Economics for the future – Beyond the superorganism

Abstract

Our environment and economy are at a crossroads. This paper attempts a cohesive narrative on how human evolved behavior, money, energy, economy and the environment fit together. Humans strive for the same emotional state of our successful ancestors. In a resource rich environment, we coordinate in groups, corporations and nations, to maximize financial surplus, tethered to energy, tethered to carbon. At global scales, the emergent result of this combination is a mindless, energy hungry, CO2 emitting Superorganism. Under this dynamic we are now behaviorally ‘growth constrained’ and will use any means possible to avoid facing this reality. The farther we kick the can, the larger the disconnect between our financial and physical reality becomes. The moment of this recalibration will be a watershed time for our culture, but could also be the birth of a new ‘systems economics’. and resultant different ways of living. The next 30 years are the time to apply all we’ve learned during the past 30 years. We’ve arrived at a species level conversation.

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Ecological Economics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon
Economics for the future – Beyond the superorganism
N.J. Hagens
Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future, United States
ABSTRACT
Our environment and economy are at a crossroads. This paper attempts a cohesive narrative on how human evolved behavior, money, energy, economy and the
environment fit together. Humans strive for the same emotional state of our successful ancestors. In a resource rich environment, we coordinate in groups, cor-
porations and nations, to maximize financial surplus, tethered to energy, tethered to carbon. At global scales, the emergent result of this combination is a mindless,
energy hungry, CO2 emitting Superorganism. Under this dynamic we are now behaviorally ‘growth constrained’ and will use any means possible to avoid facing this
reality. The farther we kick the can, the larger the disconnect between our financial and physical reality becomes. The moment of this recalibration will be a
watershed time for our culture, but could also be the birth of a new ‘systems economics’. and resultant different ways of living. The next 30 years are the time to apply
all we’ve learned during the past 30 years. We’ve arrived at a species level conversation.
“Ecological Economics addresses the relationships between ecosystems
and economic systems in the broadest sense.” – Robert Costanza,(the
first sentence in the first article in the first issue of Ecological
Economics)
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic
emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.”– E.O. Wilson
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less
and less meaning.” –Jean Baudrillard
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed
until it is faced.” – James Baldwin
1. Overview
Despite decades of warnings, agreements, and activism, human
energy consumption, emissions, and atmospheric CO2 concentrations
all hit new records in 2018 (Quéré et al., 2018). If the global economy
continues to grow at about 3.0% per year, we will consume as much
energy and materials in the next ∼30 years as we did cumulatively in
the past 10,000. Is such a scenario inevitable? Is such a scenario pos-
sible?
Simultaneously, we get daily reminders the global economy isn’t
working as it used to (Stokes, 2017) such as rising wealth and income
inequality, heavy reliance on debt and government guarantees, populist
political movements, increasing apathy, tension and violence, and
ecological decay. To avoid facing the consequences of our biophysical
reality, we’re now obtaining growth in increasingly unsustainable ways.
The developed world is using finance to enable the extraction of things
we couldn’t otherwise afford to extract to produce things we otherwise
couldn’t afford to consume.
With this backdrop, what sort of future economic systems are now
feasible? What choreography would allow them to come about? In the
fullness of the Anthropocene, what does a hard look at the relationships
between ecosystems and economic systems in the broadest sense suggest
about our collective future? Ecological economics was ahead of its time
in recognizing the fundamental importance of nature’s services and the
biophysical underpinnings of human economies. Can it now assemble a
blueprint for a ‘reconstruction’ to guide a way forward?
Before articulating prescriptions, we first need a comprehensive
diagnosis of the patient. In 2019, we are beyond a piecemeal listing of
what’s wrong. A coherent description of the global economy requires a
systems view: describing the parts, the processes, how the parts and
processes interact, and what these interactions imply about future
possibilities. This paper provides a brief overview of the relationships
between human behavior, the economy and Earth’s environment. It
articulates how a social species self-organizing around surplus has
metabolically morphed into a single, mindless, energy-hungry
“Superorganism.” Lastly, it provides an assessment of our constraints
and opportunities, and suggests how a more sapient economic system
might develop.
2. Introduction
For most of the past 300,000 years, humans lived in sustainable,
egalitarian, roaming bands where climate instability and low CO2 le-
vels made success in agriculture unlikely (Richerson et al., 2001).
Around 11,000 years ago the climate began to warm, eventually pla-
teauing at warmer levels than the previous 100,000 years (Fig. 1). This
stability allowed agriculture to develop in at least seven separate lo-
cations around the world. For the first time, groups of humans began to
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106520
Received 27 June 2019; Received in revised form 25 October 2019; Accepted 25 October 2019
E-mail address: njhagens@gmail.com.
Ecological Economics 169 (2020) 106520
Available online 20 November 2019
0921-8009/ © 2019 The Author. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY-NC-ND/4.0/).
T

organize around physical surplus - production exceeding the group’s
immediate caloric needs. Since some of the population no longer had to
devote their time to hunting and gathering, this surplus allowed the
development of new jobs, hierarchies, and complexity (Gowdy and
Krall, 2013). This novel dynamic led to widespread agriculture and
large-scale state societies over the next few thousand years (Gowdy and
Krall, 2014).
In the 19
th
century, this process was accelerated by the large-scale
discovery of fossil carbon and the invention of technologies to use it as
fuel. Fossil carbon provided humans with an extremely dense (but fi-
nite) source of energy extractable at a rate of their choosing, unlike the
highly diffuse and fixed flow of sunlight of prior eras.
This energy bounty enabled the 20
th
century to be a unique period
in human history: 1) more (and cheaper) resources led to sharp pro-
ductivity increases and unprecedented economic growth, 2) a debt
based financial system cut free from physical tethers allowed expansive
credit and related consumption to accelerate, 3) all of which fueled
resource surpluses enabling diverse and richer societies.
The 21
st
century is diverging from that trajectory: 1) energy and
resources are again becoming constraining factors on economic and
societal development, 2) physical expansion predicated on credit is
becoming riskier and will eventually reach a limit, 3) societies are be-
coming polarized and losing trust in governments, media, and science
and, 4) ecosystems are being degraded as they absorb large quantities of
energy and material waste from human systems.
Where do we go from here?
3. Human behavior
Humans are unique, but in the same ways tree frogs or hippos are
unique. We are still mammals, specifically primates. Our physical
characteristics (sclera in eyes, small mouth, lack of canines etc.) are the
products of our formative social past in small bands (Bullet et al., 2011;
Kobayashi and Kohshima, 2008). However, our brains and behaviors
too are products of what worked in our past. We don’t consciously go
through life maximizing biological fitness, but instead act as ‘adaptation
executors’ seeking to replicate the daily emotional states of our suc-
cessful ancestors (Barkow et al., 1992). Humans have an impressive
ability to process information, cooperate, and discover things, which is
what brought us to the state of organization and wealth we experience
today. But our stone-age minds are responding to modern technology,
resource abundance and large, fluid, social groups in emergent ways.
These behaviors - summarized below - underpin many of our current
planetary and cultural predicaments (Whybrow, 2013).
3.1. Status and relative comparison
Humans are a social species. Each of us is in competition for status
and resources. As biological organisms we care about relative status.
Historically, status was linked to providing resources for the clan,
leadership, respect, storytelling, ethics, sharing, and community
(Gowdy, 1998;von Rueden and Jaeggi, 2016). But in the modern cul-
ture we compete for status with resource intensive goods (cars, homes,
vacations, gadgets), using money as an intermediary driver (Erk et al.,
2002). Although most of the poorest 20% in advanced economies live
materially richer lives than the middle class in the 1900′s, one’s income
rank, as opposed to the absolute income, is what predicts life satisfac-
tion (Boyce et al., 2010). For those who don’t ‘win’, a lack of perceived
status leads to depression, drinking, stockpiling of guns and other ad-
verse behaviors (Katikireddi et al., 2017;Mencken and Froese, 2019).
Once basic needs are satisfied, we are primed to respond to the comparison
of “better vs.worse” more than we do to “a little” vs. “a lot.”
3.2. Supernormal stimuli and addiction
In our ancestral environment, the mesolimbic dopamine pathways
were linked to motivation, action and (calorific) reward. Modern
technology and abundance can hijack this same reward circuitry. The
brain of a stock trader making a winning trade lights up in an fMRI the
same way a chimpanzee’s (and presumably our distant ancestors’) does
when finding a nut or berry. But when trading stocks, playing video
games or building shopping centers, there is no instinctual ‘full’ signal
in modern brains - so we become addicted to the ‘unexpected reward’ of
the next encounter, episode, or email, at an ever increasing pace
(Hagens, 2011;Schultz et al., 1997). Our brains require flows (feelings)
that we satisfy today mostly using non-renewable stocks. In modern
resource rich culture, the ‘wanting’ becomes a stronger emotion than the
‘having’.
3.3. Cognitive biases
We didn’t evolve to have a veridical view of our world (Mark et al.,
2010). We think in words and images disconnected from physical reality.
This imagined reality commonly seems more real than science, logic and
common sense. Beliefs that arise from this virtual interface become re-
ligion, nationalism, or quixotic goals such as terraforming Mars (Harari,
2018). For most of history, we maintained groups by sharing social
myths like these. Failure to believe those myths led to ostracism and
death. Beliefs usually precede the reasons we use to explain them, and
thus are far more powerful than facts (Gazzaniga, 2012).
Psychologists have identified hundreds of cognitive biases whereby
common human behaviors depart from economic rationality. These
include: motivated reasoning, groupthink, authority bias, bystander
effect, etc. Rationality is from a newer part of our brain that is still
dominated by the more primitive, intuitive, and emotional brain
structures of the limbic system. Modern economics assumes the rational
brain is in charge, but it’s not. Combined with our tribal, in-group
nature, it’s understandable that fake news works, and that people resist
uncomfortable notions involving limits to growth, energy descent, and
climate change. Evolution selects for fitness, not truth (Hoffman, 2019).
Fig. 1. 50,000 year History of Temperature of Greenland ice surface (C°) (Hansen, 2013).
N.J. Hagens Ecological Economics 169 (2020) 106520
2

We typically only value truth if it rewards us in the short term. Ra-
tionality is the exception, not the rule.
3.4. Time bias (steep discount rates)
For good evolutionary reasons (short life spans, risk of food ex-
propriation, unstable environment, etc.) we disproportionately care
about the present more than the future, measured by economists via a
‘discount rate’(Hagens and Kunz, 2010). The steeper the discount rate,
the more the person is ‘addicted to the present.’ (Laibson et al., 2007).
Drug users and drinkers, risk takers, people with low I.Q. scores, people
who have heavy cognitive workloads, and men (vs. women) tend to
more steeply discount events or issues in the future (Chabris et al.,
2010).
Unfortunately, most of our modern challenges are ‘in the future’.
Recognition that the future exists and that we are part of it springs from
a relatively new brain structure, the neocortex. It has no direct con-
nection to deep-brain motivational centers that communicate urgency.
When asked to plan a snack for next week between chocolate or fruit,
people chose fruit 75% of the time. When choosing a snack for today,
70% select chocolate. When choosing a movie to watch next week 63%
choose an educational documentary but when choosing a film for to-
night 66% pick a comedy or sci-fi (Read et al., 1999). We have great
intentions for the future, until the future becomes today. Our neocortex
can imagine them, but we are emotionally blind to long-term issues like
climate change or energy depletion. Emotionally, the future isn’t real.
3.5. Cooperation and group behavior
Group behavior has shaped us as much as individual behavior (Wilson
and Wilson, 2008). Humans are strongly ‘groupish’ (Haidt, 2013), and
before agriculture were aggressively egalitarian (Pennisi, 2014;Boehm,
1993). Those historic tribes that could act as a cohesive unit facing a
common threat outcompeted tribes without such social cohesion. Because
of this, today we easily and quickly form ingroups and outgroups and
behave favorably and antagonistically towards them respectively. We are
also primed to cooperate with our in-group whether that is a small
business, large corporation, or even a nation-state - to obtain monetary
(or in earlier times, physical) surplus. Me over Us, Us over Them.
3.6. Cultural evolution, Ultrasociality and the Superorganism
“What took place in the early 1500s was truly exceptional, something
that had never happened before and never will again. Two cultural experi-
ments, running in isolation for 15,000 years or more, at last came face to
face. Amazingly, after all that time, each could recognize the other’s in-
stitutions. When Cortés landed in Mexico he found roads, canals, cities,
palaces, schools, law courts, markets, irrigation works, kings, priests, tem-
ples, peasants, artisans, armies, astronomers, merchants, sports, theatre, art,
music, and books. High civilization, differing in detail but alike in essentials,
had evolved independently on both sides of the earth.” Ronald Wright, A
Short History of Progress (2004, pp50-51)
“Ultrasociality refers to the most social of animal organizations, with full
time division of labor, specialists who gather no food but are fed by others,
effective sharing of information about sources of food and danger, self-sa-
crificial effort in collective defense.” (Campbell, 1974;Gowdy and Krall,
2013).
Humans are among a small handful of species that are extremely
social. Phenotypically we are primates, but behaviorally we’re more
akin to the social insects (Haidt, 2013). Our ultrasociality allows us to
function at much larger scales than as individuals. At the largest scales,
cultural evolution occurs far more rapidly than genetic evolution
(Richerson and Boyd, 2005). Via the cultural evolution that began with
agriculture, humans have evolved into a globally interconnected civi-
lization, ‘outcompeting’ other human economic models along the way
to becoming a defacto ‘superorganism’ (Hölldobler and Wilson, 2008).
A superorganism can be defined as "a collection of agents which can act in
concert to produce phenomena governed by the collective"(Kelly, 1994). Via
cooperation (and coordination), fitness transfers from lower levels to
higher levels of organization (Michod and Nedelcu, 2003). The needs of
this higher-level entity (today for humans; the global economy) mold
the behavior, organization and functions of lower-level entities (in-
dividual human behavior) (Kesebir, 2011). Human behavior is thus
constrained and modified by ‘downward causation’ from the higher
level of organization present in society (Campbell, 1974).
All the ‘irrationalities’ previously outlined have kept our species
flourishing for 300,000 years. What has changed is not ‘us’ but rather
the economic organization of our societies in tandem with technology,
scale and impact. Since the Neolithic, human society has organized
around growth of surplus, initially measured physically e.g. grain, now
measured by digital claims on physical surplus, (or money) (Gowdy and
Krall, 2014). Positive human attributes like cooperation have been co-
opted to become coordination towards surplus production. Increas-
ingly, the “purpose” of a modern human in the ultrasocial global
economy is to contribute to surplus for the market (e.g. the economic
value of a human life based on discounted lifetime income, the mar-
ginal productivity theory of labor value, etc.) (Gowdy 2019, in press).
3.7. Human behavior – summary
Our behavioral repertoire is wide, yet informed, and constrained by
our neurological heritage and the higher level of organization exhibited
by our economic system. We are born with heritable modules prepared
to react to context in predictable ways. “Who we are” as a species is
highly relevant to issues of ecological overshoot, sustainability and our
related cultural responses.
4. Energy
Ecological economics acknowledges that real economies are com-
pletely dependent on energy. However, orthodox economic theory re-
mains blind to this reality. As a result, so do our institutions and our
citizenry. The disconnect has massive implications for our future. This
is so critical it deserves reiteration.
4.1. Energy in nature
Energy is and always will be the currency of life. The effectiveness of
energy capture is central to biological systems. Any movement, activity
or event in nature requires energy. Organisms utilize foraging strategies
that optimize energy intake vs. energy expenditure adjusted for time
and risk (Krebs and Davies, 1997). In this way, biological organisms
too, are investors. A larger energy surplus gives an organism a com-
petitive advantage for growth, reproduction, defense, competition,
maintenance and repair (Lotka, 1922). As such it is the ‘net energy’
after energy costs have been subtracted that is the enabler and driver of
natural – and human – systems (Hall, 2016).
4.2. Energy and power
Biological systems maximize power. Metabolism is the rate at which
organisms acquire, transform, and expend energy and materials (Brown
et al., 2004;Schröter, 2009). “Power” is energy accessed/utilized per
unit-time. Organisms and ecosystems naturally structure themselves to
maximize power via accessing energy gradients. An oak tree doesn’t
grow one leaf (maximum efficiency) or e.g. 100 thousand leaves
(maximum gross energy), but an intermediate amount of leaves placed
to maximize the surface area of the tree to the sun for photosynthesis
(Schneider and Kay, 1994). Systems which maximize useful power
generally outcompete those which do not (Odum, 1995).
N.J. Hagens Ecological Economics 169 (2020) 106520
3

4.3. Energy benefits
Major transitions in human societies over the past 10,000 years
were linked to the benefits from different energy types and availability
(Day et al., 2018). Industrialization changed the historic human re-
lationship of energy capture from using the daily flows of nature to
using technology fueled by large amounts of cheap fossil energy.
One barrel of crude oil can perform about 1700 kW h of work. A
human laborer can perform about 0.6 kW h in one workday (IIER,
2011). Simple arithmetic reveals it takes over 11 years of human labor
to do the same work potential in a barrel of oil. Even if humans are 2.5x
more efficient at converting energy to work, the energy in one barrel of
oil substitutes approximately 4.5 years of physical human labor.
This energy/labor relationship was the foundation of the industrial
revolution. Most technological processes requires hundreds to thousands
of calories of fossil energy to replace each human calorie previously used
to do the same tasks manually. Consider milking a cow using three
methods (see Fig. 2): manual (human labor energy only), semi-automated
electric milking machines (1100 kW h per cow per year), and fully au-
tomated milking (3000 kW h per cow-year). The manual milker, working
alone, requires 120 h of human labor per year per cow; semi-automated
machines require 27 h of labor; and full automation, 12 h. We’ll estimate
that the human milker generates economic value of $5 an hour working
alone. Using electric milkers at $0.05 per kWh, output rises significantly
and—because cheap electricity substitutes for so many human hours of
labor—the revenue increases to $19 per hour with semi-automated
milkers and to $25 per hour with the fully automated technologies. (Note:
this large economic benefit could go to the owner of the dairy farm, the
employees, or to consumers in the form of cheaper milk – or any com-
bination) (Hagens, 2015). This same principle extrapolates to most
modern industrial processes: we save human labor and time by adding
large amounts of cheap fossil labor (Cleveland et al., 1984;IIER, 2011).
Although modern industrial output is energy inefficient it is ex-
tremely cost efficient because fossil energy is much cheaper than
human energy. This is the “fossil subsidy”, that makes modern profits,
wages and standards of living considerably higher compared to pre-
vious civilizations based on diffuse renewable flows. The average
human in 2015 produced 14 times more GDP than a person in 1800 –
and the average American 49 times more (Lindgren, 2011)! Modern
Americans -via their energy subsidy - now have the physical metabo-
lism of 30+ ton primates (Brown and Group, 2013;Patzek, 2011).
However, these windfalls come with a downside. Industrial profit-
ability is vulnerable to energy price increases. As indicated in orange
and grey bars in Fig. 2, a doubling or trebling of energy costs makes
previously high-profit industries with large energy input requirements
unprofitable (e.g. airlines, cement manufacture, aluminum smelting
etc.). Additionally, the reduction in profits from energy price increases
cannot be offset entirely by efficiency improvements because the
business model itself was predicated on large amounts of cheap energy.
These “reduced benefits” due to energy price increases are a worldwide
phenomenon (EIA, 2013;Kingsley-Jones, 2013).
4.4. Energy scale
In 2018, the global economy ran on a constant 17 trillion watts of
energy - enough to power over 170 billion 100-watt light bulbs con-
tinuously. Over 80% of this energy, shown in Fig. 3, was the 110 billion
barrels of oil equivalents of fossil hydrocarbons that power (and is em-
bodied in) our machines, transportation and infrastructure. At 4.5 years
per barrel, this equates to the labor equivalent of more than 500 billion
human workers (compared to ∼4 billion actual human workers). The
economic story of the 20th century was one of adding ancient solar
productivity from underground to the agricultural productivity of the
land. These fossil ‘armies’ are the foundation of the modern global
economy and work tirelessly in thousands of industrial processes and
transportation vectors. We didn’t pay for the creation of these armies of
workers, only their liberation. Transitioning away from them, either via
taxation or depletion, will necessarily mean less ‘benefits.’
4.5. Energy substitutability
Modern economic theory considers all inputs fungible and sub-
stitutable. If the price of one input gets too high, the market will de-
velop an alternative. However, energy does not cooperate with this
theory because different sources of energy exhibit critical differences in
quality, density, storability, surplus, transportability, environmental
impact, and other factors. For instance, there are hundreds of medium
and high heat industrial processes (for textiles, chemicals, cement, steel
etc.) using fossil fuels that have no current (or even under development)
alternative using low- carbon technology (Khanna et al., 2017). Energy
can only be substituted by a similar form/quality energy.
4.6. Energy primacy
Energy is so fundamental, that its availability sets the physical limits
to our social scale. All life, commerce, work, or creation of order is
enabled and limited by available net energy (Hall and Klitgaard, 2011).
As GDP increases globally, energy needs to increase in lockstep. Until
the 1970s, energy and GDP were nearly perfectly correlated; a 5% in-
crease in GDP required a 5% rise in energy consumption (Cleveland
Fig. 2. Impact of technology + cheap/expensive energy on wages/profits.
N.J. Hagens Ecological Economics 169 (2020) 106520
4

et al., 1984). This was followed by a short-term energy/GDP decoupling
due to efficiency advancements resulting from the oil & natural gas
price shocks in the United States. This further led to a switching from oil
use in power plants to nuclear and natural gas. By the mid-1980s debt
and globalization were used to increase access to energy needed to keep
GDP growing. Much fanfare is made about long term declines in energy
intensity. For instance, from 1965 to 2012 the number of MegaJoules
used per $ of global GDP declined from 11 to 8, ostensibly signifying a
decoupling. However, averaged annually, over these years, the corre-
lation between energy and GDP remained a tightly linked 99.4%
(Energy & Stuff, 2019).
But as a result of these trends, energy intensity improved faster than
the historical rate during the last two decades of the 20th century.
Heterodox theories linking productivity to energy (Gilliland, 1975)
were cast aside in favor of other less limiting descriptions of human
economic prosperity. From 2000–2012, the annual rate of relative de-
coupling dropped back down to 0.3% per year (Energy & Stuff, 2019).
Since then, data is inconsistent due to many changes to GDP accounting
methods, but the general principle remains: for additional economic
activity, we need more energy.
Today, energy is still treated as merely another input into our eco-
nomic system – $10 of gasoline is considered to have the same con-
tribution to human output as $10 of Pokemon cards. This is in spite of
the fact that: a) energy is needed to create and transform all material
inputs and b) energy can only be substituted by other energy.
Mainstream economic theory attributes all economic productivity to
labor and capital, and therefore assumes the economic importance of
energy equals its cost share (Solow, 1994). However, biophysical ana-
lysis of all production inputs shows that the economic importance of
energy is substantially larger than energy’s share in total factor cost,
with the opposite being true for labor. This means that energy has a
significantly greater role in our wealth and productivity than its nom-
inal cost share signal. In the case of Japan and Germany over 60% of
economic productivity is explained by energy input (Kümmel and
Lindenberger, 2014). The relationship would be considerably stronger
if tested at the global level (Ayres et al., 2013), because globalization
allowed us to shift energy and resource use away from advanced
economies (Bank of America Merrill Lynch, 2019). Alternative methods
highlight that primary energy consumption is tied to accumulated
global wealth via an energy constant of 9.7 ± 0.3 mW per 1990 US
dollar (Garrett, 2012). Rather than being an insignificant factor in
productivity energy is the major factor.
Prior to the industrial age, all relevant economic theorists (including
Adam Smith, David Ricardo and others) used land and land pro-
ductivity to describe the human ecosystem (Warr, 2011). As the global
economy expanded with increasing subsidy from fossil energy, land
productivity and physical input constraints were considered un-
necessary and eventually removed entirely from economic theory. By
the time of the first energy crisis in the 1970s, macroeconomic de-
scriptions had been reduced to labor and capital via the Cobb-Douglas
function and Solow Residual, where they (mostly) remain today (Keen
et al., 2019;Santos et al., 2018). We had created an infinite growth
model on a finite planet.
Economists view capital, labor and human creativity as primary and
energy secondary or absent. The opposite is, in fact, true. We are energy
blind.
1
4.7. Energy and technology
Most modern technological advances are not stand-alone but powered
by either liquid fuel or electricity. Biophysically, there are two general
types of technology. Type 1 technology finds ways to use energy more
efficiently (power plant improvements, better vehicle fuel efficiency) or
invents new energy sources (solar or geothermal). Type 2 technology
consists of devices that replace manual human labor (chainsaws, cars) or
new ways for humans to use energy (Facebook, Candycrush).
Currently Type 2 dominates technology inventions and increases
total global demand for energy (De Decker, 2018). Technology like the
‘cloud’ is not really “virtual”. Computers and cellphones (including
servers and networks), consume over 15% of the world’s electricity, and
this will increase with the advent of 5 G (Andrae and Edler, 2015).
Technology is an expression of the available energy we can exploit
(Brockway, 2013). What we call “technological progress” at any time is
Fig. 3. Global energy mix 1800–2018 (Source: BP, 2019, Likvern 2019).
1
Note: some biophysical researchers extend energy’s role in the production
function too far -to a complete ‘energy theory of value’. Though capital and
labor are both variables dependent on energy, they are each essential in their
own right. If you don’t have enough capital (i.e. factories), you can burn as
much oil and coal as you want, but will lack the output. If you don’t have the
skilled labor to do the job, you will have poor resource productivity.
N.J. Hagens Ecological Economics 169 (2020) 106520
5

mostly the development of the capital base to support an ever-greater
throughput of available energy at a later time. With growing GDP as a
global goal, extra energy allows for more inventions that in turn make
our economy more complex. Furthermore, higher social/technological
complexity itself requires higher energy consumption– resulting in the
energy complexity spiral (Tainter and Patzek, 2012).
4.8. Energy Depletion
Using photosynthesis as a trickle charge, hundreds of millions of
years of living biomass were stored as hydrocarbons in Earth’s battery.
We are drawing down this carbon battery 10-million times faster than it
was charged (Schramski et al., 2015). Estimates of remaining oil and
natural gas vary widely (Mohr et al., 2015), but the cheap high quality
oil, at scale, has largely been found and exploited (Fustier et al., 2016;
Masnadi and Brandt, 2017).
The left side of Fig. 4 conveys a misleading, but common inter-
pretation of current U.S. oil production. Due to technology advance-
ments, U.S.A has become the world’s top oil producer. One is left with
the false impression that technology has triumphed depletion making
oil abundant and therefore not a risk to future growth. However, reality
is more accurately depicted in the right panel, where, collectively, non-
shale oil sources are shown to be in permanent decline. The up-tic in
total production is a consequence of tight oil (in red), recently scaling to
52% of all production. Tight oil is in the source rock where all other oil
originated. Tight oil is economically and ecologically costly and quickly
depleted (by as much as 90% in the first 3 years). A typical new well
requires complex equipment, 1200 truckloads of water, 100 train car-
loads of sand and $8-10 million in drilling and completion cost
(Robinson, 2014). This explains why the US Drilling Oil and Gas Wells
Producer Price Index increased 350% from 2005 to 2014 (U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics, 2018).
During this time, the market price of oil, has not kept up with its
extraction cost. Since Q3, 2014, capital expenditures on shale plays
have exceeded cash flow 19 quarters in a row (Rassenfoss, 2019). Be-
cause of the steep decline rates of existing fields (shale and conven-
tional), the International Energy Agency asserts that with no new
drilling, world oil production would be cut in half by 2025 and to only
15% of today’s output by 2040 (“WEO 2018,” 2018). Of course, we will
invest in new oil fields – but doing so will require a higher oil price,
which would lead to lower economic growth (see Fig. 2, grey columns).
Energy’s cost share of our economy, after five centuries of decline,
reached a low in 1999 and has been increasing since (King, 2015).
When obtaining energy requires more energy, materials and money, the
economy suffers because discretionary wealth is redirected or drained
away (Capellán-Pérez et al., 2019). Earth’s geological battery of energy
dense carbon is not unlimited, and we’ve already found and used the
cheapest and easiest. Relative to 2008, debates about oil scarcity, and
‘peak oil’ have morphed into ‘peak demand’ and electrification of
transportation as solutions. However, the net energy of remaining re-
serves, their affordability, and society's ability to allocate capital to
recover them remain central questions (Brockway et al., 2019).
4.9. Energetic remoteness
Barriers of energy, time, materials and complexity separate us from
the things we want and need. Our natural subsidy of concentrated ores
is declining along with the natural subsidy of fossil hydrocarbons. We
don’t face ‘the end’ of oil, copper and water, but we do face increasing
effort and cost to extract these resources from lower grade ores. This
will have a corresponding effect on benefits to societies.
Energy enters the global economy via exploration, extraction,
transformation of natural resources, and transportation. Energy is thus
embedded in every industrial process, mineral and material in our
economies. Raw materials — such as copper, phosphorous, or alu-
minum — are easier to extract and refine when they are concentrated.
As energy becomes more expensive, and we deplete the concentrated,
easy resources, many commodities become more "remote" for our use
because they become more expensive to find and extract.
Copper is a key industrial commodity for scaling renewable-based
technologies such as electric vehicles (García-Olivares and Ballabrera-
Poy, 2015). Fig. 5 shows the annual copper production relative to 2001
(in blue) for the country of Chile. The total energy used to process
copper ore and overburden is shown in red. Lower quality ore grades
require increased energy (and water), leading to less copper expected to
be available in the coming decade (Copper Commission of Chile, 2018)
at the same time demand for copper is increasing.
This same ‘energetic remoteness’ applies to many key resources,
including water, lithium, and food. We use around two calories of fossil
fuel to grow one food calorie in our modern agricultural system – but
we use 8–12 additional fossil calories to process, package, deliver, store
and cook modern food (Bradford, 2019). In the natural world, this is
unsustainable. Organisms that require more energy to find food than
the food contains, will die. We only get away with this because our
institutions and policies treat the energy subsidy from fossil hydro-
carbons as interest, not principal. Everything we do will become more
expensive if we cannot reduce energy consumption of industrial pro-
cesses faster than prices grow.
4.10. Energy and money
Society runs on energy and materials, but most people think it runs
on money. Indeed, money is the only part of our economies not subject to
laws of thermodynamics because it is created as debt subject to
Fig. 4. U.S.A. Oil Production.1900–2018.
N.J. Hagens Ecological Economics 169 (2020) 106520
6

mathematical laws of compound interest (Soddy, 1933). Commercial
banks are not intermediaries that lend out existing capital (Jakab and
Kumhof, 2015), but rather create money by loaning it into existence
(McLeay and Radia, 2014). Contrary to what is taught in economics
textbooks, money is not lent out from existing wealth– it is created
(Werner, 2014;Ament, 2019). This new money eventually gets spent on
a good or service which will contain embodied energy. Money is a claim
on energy yet its creation is not tethered to energy availability or cost.
4.11. Energy and debt
Since money is a claim on energy
2
, then debt is a claim on future
energy. Business schools teach that debt is neutral to the capital
structure, an ‘intertemporal transfer of consumption preference.’ Thus,
GDP generated with debt, or with cash, are considered equivalent. In an
economy of perpetual growth opportunities, this might be appropriate.
However, in every single year since 1965, both the USA and World have
grown debt more than GDP. This makes debt more accurately an ‘in-
tertemporal transfer of consumption’.
Debt is a social construct with physical consequences. Fig. 6 illus-
trates how debt pulls resources forward in time. In this hypothetical oil
field, the differing shaded areas represent different cost tranches of an
oil resource.
3
Obtaining access to cheap financing allows a company to
expand drilling into marginally commercial areas as long as new
creditors believe in future prospects. This debt funding allows the oil
company to ‘create a bigger straw’, to extract new higher-cost oil (dark
black on right panel) and raise total field production (Hughes, 2019).
However, this results in steeper future declines because the temporary
increase cannot be sustained: the next tranche available for
Fig. 5. Energy consumption and copper production (Copper Commission of Chile, 2018).
Fig. 6. Hypothetical oil field production with and without using debt.
2
Money is a claim on energy, materials and many other things. But every
single good and service which generates GDP requires some energy conversion,
hence the simplification: ‘money is a claim on energy’.
3
By definition we can’t compare a real field drilled using debt financing re-
lative to the same one using no debt. But an oil production profile depends on
the rate of capital input. E.g. In 2019 the Bakken now requires about 750 $7.5-
million-dollar wells to offset the 40.6% first year field decline to keep pro-
duction flat at current levels = $5.625 billion per year (just for drilling and
completion). The higher production grows the more wells have to be drilled just
to offset decline (Hughes, 2019). It is extremely unlikely this could be done
without debt, and its related risks.
N.J. Hagens Ecological Economics 169 (2020) 106520
7

development yields poorer well and financial performance often ac-
companied by higher decline rates and lower quality oil. Unconven-
tional oil and gas typifies this phenomenon (Kelly, 2019).
Fig. 6 illustrates not only how oil production responds to debt in-
fusions, but the consumption of entire economies. Low entropy (high
concentration, high quality) resources underpin our productivity. Thus
debt can be seen as a tool humans use to access an energy gradient, and
the resulting goods and services. Debt has been referred to as ‘fake
energy’ (Weyler, 2011). More accurately, debt moves real energy and
consumption from the future, to the present, unsustainably. But it is
fake in the sense that to pay back the debt, we have to also pay back the
energy. One could say this amount (and related consumption) is “bor-
rowed” energy.
4.12. Energy and well-being
Despite the pervasive belief that more money and energy makes us
happier, evidence suggests this is mostly not true. After basic needs are
met, additional energy use yields a slower growth of the Human
Development Index (Smil, 2017). Although Americans use 20 times
more energy per capita than Filipinos, the percentage of ‘very happy’
citizens remains equal (Hagens, 2007) (Fig. 7).
Other biophysical (and psychological) indicators may track human
well-being more closely than GDP and energy use (Lambert et al., 2014;
Roy et al., 2012). If we have social support structures, many physical
inconveniences can be overcome (Venniro et al., 2018). After basic
needs are met, the best things in life are free.
4.13. “Externalities’ and energy
Society may remain energy blind, but we are rapidly becoming
aware of the negative consequences of the global human enterprise
(Weyler, 2018). Negative impacts for humans include: topsoil loss,
endocrine disrupting chemicals (Fischer, 2019), declining sperm counts
(Levine et al., 2017), mounting inequality, water shortages (Schewe
et al., 2014), declining median incomes (in the developed world)
(Hannon, 2019), populism, depression (Hidaka, 2012) worry about the
future, and geopolitical risks. Negative impacts to the natural world
include: CO2 risks to climate (C. Oppenheimer et al., 2017) to ecosys-
tems (Saunders, 2005), ocean acidification, coral loss and other ocean
impacts (Caesar et al., 2018;Schmidtko et al., 2017;Ward, 2008;Yeo,
1998), deforestation, insect decline (Hallmann et al., 2017;Sánchez-
Bayo and Wyckhuys, 2019), bird decline (Allinson, 2018), extinction of
primates (Estrada et al., 2017) decline of (wild) mammal populations
(Bar-on et al., 2018), plastics in oceans (Eriksen et al., 2014;Koelmans
et al., 2014), microplastics and airborne phthalates (Jamieson et al.,
n.d.; Lenoir et al., 2016), loss of forests, and general risk of a 6
th
mass
extinction (Ceballos et al., 2015;González et al., 2017). All readers of
this journal are aware of the social and ecological impacts of economic
activity ‘external’ to the market pricing system. Most of these are en-
abled and worsened by cheap energy, but are absolutely internal to a
fossil fuel based economy.
4.14. Energy – summary
Soaring GDP in the 20
th
century was tightly linked to soaring
burning of fossil hydrocarbons. Society doesn’t yet recognize these links
because we conflate the dollar cost of energy extraction (tiny) with the
work value (huge). Energy is only substitutable with other similar
quality energy. Increasingly, advanced technology is achieved with
energy, and most technological advances increase future energy re-
quirements. We can (for now) readily print money but we can’t print
energy to give it value. We can only develop new sources or extract
what exists faster or learn to use it more efficiently. We’ve papered over
already visible declines in energy growth rates and resource quality by
using credit in breathtaking volumes. Modern economic theory ignores
or minimizes most of these points, as do our institutions, policies and
plans. In the future, the scale, quality, and cost of energy will dictate
what sort of human systems are possible. We remain energy blind.
5. Synthesis
Fig. 8 is a conceptualization of the last few and next few hundred
years (not to scale). The green line represents sustainable flow levels
available to humanity which reached technological and geographical
limits in the 19
th
century. The red line represents the one-time pulse of
non-renewable natural resource inputs to human economies (oil, gas,
copper, etc.). The black line represents financial markers (money,
credit, etc.) of the underlying primary capital.
In the pre-Industrial era up to Point A, humankind migrated around
the planet accessing solar flows using relatively simple technology such
Fig. 7. Energy Use per capita vs Human Development.
Fig. 8. Humans and Resource Access.
N.J. Hagens Ecological Economics 169 (2020) 106520
8

as agriculture, sails, slaves and animal labor. At the dawn of the in-
dustrial revolution, Point B, humanity added the condensed stocks of
hydrocarbons to previously flow-based human economies. A valid de-
scription of the Solow residual (i.e. the economic growth not explained
by labor or capital) was absent during this time because the black line
and red line were tracking together.
Between B and C we hit an energy crisis in the 1970s, which we
‘solved’ by both 1) using debt to pull consumption forward in time and
2) globalization and outsourcing to the cheapest areas of production.
These changes allowed economic growth to continue until it hit a wall
with conventional finance in 2008 (Point C)– at which point central
banks and global governments were forced to essentially redesign the
entire financial system. This new (ongoing) paradigm involved mea-
sures such as too-big-to-fail guarantees, artificially low interest rates
(even negative!) (Salmon, 2019), quantitative easing, central bank
balance sheet expansion and various GDP-friendly rule changes
(Alderman, 2014). The continued increase in global credit allowed:
access to costlier tranches of resources, more social programs, cheap
financing for renewable energy, and a sustained – if tepid – return to
economic growth since 2009. We are now heading towards Point D,
where our global monetary representations of reality continue to de-
couple from the underlying biophysical reality (red curve).
Since 2007 we have grown our global debt 3.5x faster than we’ve
grown our economies bringing global debt/GDP ratio to over 300%
(Tiftik et al., 2019). Most institutional experts and pundits are aware of
Point D, but because of cultural energy blindness, are generally not
aware of this point in relation to the red line, or even that there is a red
line. Eventually we will discover that the black line (money and credit)
also has limits, which ultimately are tethered to the growth enabled by
energy and resource availability and cost.
5.1. Humans → superorganism
We expend energy to produce work because our brains seek emo-
tional states similar to that of our successful ancestors – physical and
emotional homeostasis, comfort, status, excitement, relaxation, etc. all
modulated by hormones, neurotransmitters and endocrine signals. To a
Tibetan monk, this ‘state of comfort’ might be sitting quietly all day on
a wooden bench, but for most humans in modern consumer culture,
achieving this emotional state means: eating at a better restaurant,
buying a better car, air conditioning or heat, fast internet, faster
transportation, etc. For most people these preferences have a strong
correlation to devices and processes requiring energy. Our ancestors
didn’t live with Instagram,Fortnight, Teslas, sushi or Netflix. Addiction
to modern stimuli and comfort tethers to resource consumption
(Hagens, 2011;Ladika, 2018).
Additionally, we do not choose to wait or defer consumption and
experiences. Rather, we have a strong preference for positive experiences
in the present moment (Hagens, 2010). Even the ecologically literate will
avoid ‘sustainable’ practices that accomplish equal goals but require
more time (Penn, 2019). Since consumption requires energy, and we
(generally) prefer immediate gratification, we can understand how our
behaviors are linked to power (energy/time) in the real world (Hagens
and Kunz, 2010). This seeking of 'power' by individuals, aggregated at
the economy level, also explains the compulsion of debt, which pulls
energy and material consumption to the present .
5.2. The Superorganism: blind, hungry and in charge
What began some 11,000 years ago as hunter gatherers cooperating
to obtain physical surplus from land, has morphed into a globally
connected human culture maximizing financial representations of
physical surplus (Gowdy and Krall, 2013). In pursuit of economic
growth, modern human culture appears as a self-organized, mindless,
energy seeking Superorganism, functioning in similar ways to a brain-
less amoeba using simple tropisms. But why? How?
In nature, an individual starling follows three simple rules
(Reynolds, 1987):
1) Do what your neighbor does
2) Don’t get too close
3) Fly towards the center
When tens of thousands of starlings follow these simple rules we see
a beautiful, complex murmuration in the sky. This is an emergent result
not predictable by the biology and behavior of the individual birds.
In similar ways, the surplus creating “requirements” of the global
economic superorganism call forth compatible behaviors like acquisi-
tiveness, greed for possessions, and simplified individual behaviors.
Today, most modern humans – as individuals – follow something like
the following 3 simple rules:
1) Execute optimal foraging algorithms by coordinating with other humans
(families, small businesses, corporations, nations) towards acquiring fi-
nancial surplus
2) Pursue culturally condoned behaviors
3) Spend the financial surplus on comfortable, fun things or experiences (as
long as culturally acceptable)
In a global culture maximizing surplus value, human brains are thus
linked to energy use via the 'pursuit of comfort' and 'avoidance of pain'.
In aggregate, human economies require power just as animals eat food,
or oak trees grow leaves (Odum, 2007). The emergent property of 7.7
billion humans going through their daily lives following simple rules
like these is a ‘Superorganism’ with a 17 TW metabolism
4
.
6. Implications
There are several key implications from humanity effectively func-
tioning as a Superorganism.
6.1. Gross domestic product (GDP) → gross world burning (GWB)
Biological scaling laws follow the natural, emergent outgrowth of
networks —in the case of animals, a blood circulatory network which
transports hemoglobin throughout the ‘volume’ of the organism.
Klieber’s Law observes that the energy metabolism of animals is pro-
portional to their mass scaled to the ¾ power (Thommen et al., 2019).
The flow of petroleum through modern economies can be likened to the
flow of blood in mammals (Marder et al., 2016) with the veins and
arteries of the human ‘sphere’ being the global air, sea and road
transportation nodes (Kleinschroth et al., 2019). Virtually all human
infrastructure - gas stations, surface area of roads, hospitals etc., scale
using similar biological allometry relationships (West, 2017). Connec-
tions – veins in bodies, social media, telephones or highways, scale at
roughly ½ of the number of nodes squared (.5n
2
). Each of these nodes
requires energy to maintain and new nodes need energy to connect.
Modern human society can thus be viewed as a macro-organism, whose
energy metabolism increases at the size of the global GDP to the ¾
power (Brown et al., 2011;Patzek, 2011). Larger animals – and larger
economies-are more efficient, which is why they don’t scale 1 for 1.
Economic growth can only experience ‘absolute decoupling’ if we
increase GDP while decreasing primary energy consumption. Relative
decoupling occurs when total primary energy grows but at a smaller rate
4
It remains to be seen what impact counter-culture movements will have on
the Superorganism. So far, those who reject consumption and mindless con-
ventional behavior have had only negligible effect on global energy use and
carbon emissions. However, in the context of this paper, counter culture activity
is also emergent and may yet prove to help redirect or respond to the
Superorganism.
N.J. Hagens Ecological Economics 169 (2020) 106520
9

than GDP. Since dual statistics began in 1965, there has been no ab-
solute decoupling globally and negligible relative decoupling (0.5%)
(Heun and Brockway, 2019). From 2012–2017 there appeared to be an
increase in relative decoupling but this was largely an artifact of a
larger portion of GDP going to financial (virtual) assets, implying an
even tighter energy/economy link once the financial system recali-
brates (Kovacic et al., 2018). Nor has the move to ‘service’ economies
reduced the strong GDP/energy link (Fix, 2019).
Every single good and service in the global (or your own) economy
started somewhere with a small fire. We cannot decouple this basic
relationship on an absolute basis (Ward et al., 2016), and relative de-
coupling will be minor as long as GDP growth is our cultural goal. GDP
is a poor metric of our well-being and cultural progress. It is however a
reasonably good metric of how much energy humans burn: GWB –
Gross World Burning.
In principle a superorganism could be super intelligent but ours is
not. In the 1930s economists chose GDP as a metric to track economic
activity, not as an end goal. Yet almost 100 years later, our economies
unconsciously, relentlessly, pursue the GDP carrot, often toward fri-
volous endeavors that promise the greatest financial return in the
shortest time. Currently, no one is driving this societal bus, neither
billionaires, politicians, nor a secret cabal (White and Hagens, 2019).
We are all caught up in the global growth imperative, which is immune
from self-criticism. In the same way that ants pursue individual tasks for
the growth of the colony, humans have outsourced our individuality to
the ‘cloud’, which is itself devoid of an actual brain. The more people
involved in a decision/process, the more our decisions resemble simple
bacterial tropisms which unconsciously move towards energy acquisi-
tion. At the largest levels, the global economy is moving much like a
starling murmuration following simple emergent rules. In the year 2019
C.E. the emergent result of 7.7+ billion hominids living their daily lives
is an energy seeking Superorganism, out of control, yet still hungry.
This superorganism is not human. It's a thing-in-itself (Ding an sich)
with its own survival instincts that override the individual humans that
comprise it (White and Hagens, 2019).
6.2. Climate change and ocean risks- the metabolism of the superorganism
Fig. 9 depicts CO₂ concentrations over time with highlighted major
efforts to reduce emissions. Despite these efforts, 2018 marked the year
with the most energy ever burned, the most CO₂ ever emitted by hu-
mans, and the highest atmospheric concentrations in over three million
years (Willeit et al., 2019). Because of the direct linkage of human
economies to ‘fire’ and fire to carbon, climate change and ocean acid-
ification are - and will likely remain - directly linked to the metabolism
of human economies. A central finding in the AR5 climate assessment
was that the single largest driver of emissions globally was growth in
income (Victor et al., 2014). The tight power-law relationship described
above infers that current levels of economic consumption would not be
feasible without fossil carbon and hydrocarbon consumption (Marder
et al., 2016). In an economic system dependent on energy to grow,
motivating voters to choose to keep carbon in the ground is akin to
arguing with a forest fire. Climate change and its mitigation are thus
‘downstream’ of the superorganism.
5
6.3. Population
Overpopulation is also downstream of this Superorganism’s growth
dynamic. The global economy and monetary systems are based on and
require growth. Growth requires consumption. Consumption requires
consumers. Additional consumers requires more babies. In countries with
falling population growth (e.g. Denmark), governments now pay for
advertising for couples to go on ‘sexy vacations’ (McCoy, 2014). Since the
current economic system requires growth, we need someone to pay for
toys, diapers, teachers, and pensions. A baby strike (unlikely) would
eventually crash the financial claims on future energy. Climate and
overpopulation are behaviorally downstream of the GDP-seeking emer-
gent property of human cultures. We can ‘solve’ these issues, but not until
the Superorganism a) shrinks b) changes direction or c) is overthrown.
6.4. Renewables
Beyond absolute or relative energy decoupling, there is carbon de-
coupling -e.g. the same level of GDP using less carbon. Environmental
media have popularized the narrative we can completely de-carbonize
the economy. Proponents point to the fact that since 2003, over 20
countries, including the USA and UK, have reduced GHGs while
growing their economies (Aden, 2016). However, this accounting ne-
glects that these economies exported their carbon-intensive manu-
facturing to cheap labor regions. China’s industrial sector alone uses
almost as much energy as the entire US economy (National Bureau of
Statistics, 2018), and the USA now imports what it used to produce.
Carbon emissions and economic activity can be “decoupled” if we
increase non-fossil energy production faster than energy consumption
growth (essentially: faster than economic growth). But that’s not hap-
pening globally. Figure 10 shows the increase in consumption from
fossil carbon and hydrocarbons and from renewables this century. The
only year that fossil fuel consumption dropped (or increased less than
renewables) was the global financial crash of 2009. In fact, the increase
in global electricity demand in just 2018 was more than the entire
historical installed capacity of solarvoltaics (BP, 2019). Fig. 10 reveals
that the only genuine solutions to overshoot and carbon emissions will
include economic contraction, not growth.
The Superorganism grows, and doesn’t (voluntarily) shrink. Under
this logic we will have to change economic systems before we can
meaningfully decarbonize the economy. Even the switch from wood to
coal wasn’t really a ‘transition’ only an addition. We are consuming
more forest biomass globally today than we were at the dawn of the
industrial revolution (BP, 2019). Likewise, renewables are adding en-
ergy, not replacing hydrocarbons. If this continues, renewables
6
will
continue to scale, but only as part of a larger energy dissipating, CO2
Fig. 9. CO2 concentrations vs human social mileposts.
5
There is an irony here: climate stability birthed human agriculture which
birthed the Superorganism which via industrialization and the Carbon Pulse, is
now in turn destabilizing the climate
6
technically ‘rebuildables’ – an oak trees and geese are renewable (via acorns
and eggs), solar arrays, wind turbines etc. are at best ‘repeatable’, use complex
material infrastructure, and are themselves a product of the 500 billion fossil
army laborers)
N.J. Hagens Ecological Economics 169 (2020) 106520
10

emitting structure (Heinberg and Fridley, 2016;Smil, 2013).
Additionally, between 1970 and 2010, estimated total global ex-
traction of natural resources from Earth (fuels, ores, salts, biomass, etc.)
grew 3.2-fold from 22 to 70 billion tons (UNEP International Resource
Panel, 2016). During the same time period, the size of the world
economy, adjusted for inflation, grew 3.4-fold from $18.9 to $65.6
trillion. For one additional unit of Gross World Product (GWP), we
needed close to one additional unit of natural resources. If we remain at
17 TW, whether carbon intensive or carbon neutral, we’ll still need
∼1 kg of minerals and materials for every $2 of global GDP. Physics
suggests that this is not possible, and that our answers will primarily be
found through social changes linked with contraction, not technical
innovations resulting in long-term growth.
6.5. Credit and financialization
Although we currently witness emotional signals that injustice,
wealth inequality, and climate change, are real and urgent issues, there
appears to be little awareness of constraints concerning energy and fi-
nance. The modern system has used finance to obfuscate the fact that
we have consumed beyond our means for at least the past 50 years. The
energy/credit/growth dynamic is the least understood but most important
phenomenon driving the current global economic and ecological situation.
Think of credit as a magic wand, that allows us to spend more than
our income with a promise to pay it back in the future. This only works
well when our economy is growing and there are enough untapped
resources (e.g. 1950) to allow future growth to repay those debts.
Fig. 11 indicates debt (black) vs GDP (green) for the USA. The charts
for most other developed nations debt/GDP show similar patterns.
Without growing (just) our government debt our economy would have
stopped growing over a decade ago. Much of our recent GDP growth
has just been spending borrowed money (Coogan, 2019a). Globally,
this ‘debt productivity’ (economic growth relative to debt growth) is
now down to about 30-cents on the dollar. Should this ratio reach zero,
we’d be adding debt just to keep the economy the same size. We have
been growing our obligations faster than we’re growing our economies,
Fig. 10. Fossil energy and renewable energy consumption.
Fig. 11. US GDP vs Debt 1951–2014.
N.J. Hagens Ecological Economics 169 (2020) 106520
11

because we had to. Globally, accessing our magic credit wand is dan-
gerous and unsustainable, yet the Superorganism requires us to attempt
it.
For example, the large amounts of credit created by China since the
Great Financial Crisis increased demand (and prices) for commodities
and energy globally. China’s economy is now very large – approxi-
mately $13 Trillion – but they’ve created about $55 trillion in credit to
maintain their current consumption. When growth stops – which is
inevitable – there are trillions of dollars of unsupportable loans in China
alone – versus $800 billion in the Global Financial Crisis in 2008/9
(Coogan, 2019b).
In 2018, global credit growth began to slow. Along with slower
economic growth there are signs of deflationary impact — because
many people can no longer afford basic things (inflation remains — but
mostly in healthcare, education, real assets and financial assets) (Irwin,
2014). Global bonds that have negative interest rates (something un-
imaginable in the past) total $14 trillion and growing. In Scandinavia, a
home mortgage may now carry a below-zero interest rate (Coogan,
2019b). This low cost of capital, which has incentivized homeowner
loans, is also crippling return rates for savers, and posing significant
risks to pension funds, which depend on 7–8% a year annual returns.
We increasingly hear about the risks that climate change has on
insurance, and financial futures. The head of the Commodity Futures
Trading Commission (CFTC) recently stated: “It’s abundantly clear that
climate change poses a financial risk to the stability of the financial
system”(Behnam, 2019).
What the CFTC commissioner didn’t say is that finance poses a fi-
nancial risk to the stability of the system. Despite massive credit in-
jections, our productivity per unit of labor since 2011 is at 40 year lows
(U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2018). If you add all the unfunded
liabilities on top of government and private debt, the USA currently has
obligations of 1200% of GDP (Shin and Brancaccio, 2018). As debt
relative to GDP rises, the ‘debt productivity’ of each additional dollar
declines, eventually reaching a limit requiring: write-offs, foreclosures,
deflation, and a smaller economy at best, with currency reform and
systemic risk at worst.
At its core our culture has a flawed macroeconomic model. We are
slowly figuring out the relationship between energy, technology and the
economy. It is yet to be seen if there can be such a thing as ‘credit
decoupling’, (growth, but with decreasing global credit), but based on
the correlation of the past 50 years and the direct link between money
creation, and the spending of it, this seems unlikely. The next big
questions revolve around ‘what is money’, en route to ‘do we have a
goal?’ In the meantime, what's relevant is that we cannot solve a credit
crisis using more credit (McCulley, 2009). Recall that debt is a lien on
energy. If we are ever to honor our current debts, the amount of energy
required will be immense. If the energy is not available, at cheap prices,
those debts will never be repaid, something that has happened his-
torically with debt again and again (Graeber, 2011).
7. The great simplification
Fig. 12 returns to the big picture. After kicking various cans down
the road to continue growth, we are now approaching Point X, using the
black line (credit) to increase the rate at which we access fossil energy
and non-renewable resources, and hence generate global GDP. All
governments and major institutions nominally are planning for growth
(towards Point Y). We are using the black line (finance) and the stories
that support it to temporarily extend the red line in that direction.
Recall how debt pulls resources forward in the oilfield example. An
entire economy is no different. We should be planning for an energy
level around Fwhich would consciously direct our remaining low-en-
tropy energy and materials to build renewable infrastructure and a
society based largely on ecosystem flows.
7
However, the Superorganism
dynamic of the market can only ‘see’ and move towards Point Y. It
cannot see the risk of Z (a rough landing point if we stopped using
credit to drive growth), nor how to make a long term plan for an energy
throughput in the neighborhood of Point F.
Under this analysis, a reduction of GDP in advanced economies is
now likely: 1) when we can no longer access consumption via adding
credit, and 2) with a shift towards lower quality and more costly energy
and resources. The 20
th
century experienced increasing energy quality
and decreasing energy prices. The 21
st
century will be a story of de-
creasing energy quality and increasing energy cost. In tandem with
some fraction of the best remaining fossil energy, we certainly could use
intermittent renewable energy in ways that could power a great human
civilization – but it would look quite different than the one we currently
live in and are planning for. Unfortunately, the Superorganism cannot
plan, only slough forward seeking more energy and growth.
8. Social traps
Many challenges we face appear as classic social traps, whereby
short-term social pressures guide individual behavior in opposition to
the best long-run interest of the individual and society (Costanza,
1987). Cognitively, the implications presented in this paper are un-
derstandable to most people fluent in the issues, but behaviorally re-
main almost the perfect storm for the human brain to ignore or deny.
The issues are: complex, abstract, in the future, threatening to politi-
cians and business owners, difficult to answer, largely ignored by lea-
ders, and depressing to think about. Typically, a description of our
biophysical reality is met with denial or nihilism.
Both denial and nihilism help the mind remove dissonance and thus
emotionally absolve a person from working to make (uncomfortable)
changes that might improve our chances. This and other social traps
appear to mitigate against meaningful action. Our super sociality results
in valuing conformity over science, and valuing fairness of process over
quality of results. We attempt to use social sorting mechanisms (po-
pularity/status) to solve complex problems. Perhaps the biggest social
trap of all is that we don’t actually need all this energy and material
stuff to be happy or healthy. Nevertheless, led by the emergent drive of
the Superorganism, we let pecuniary metrics, social comparisons, and
novel technology, drag us into unnecessary and wasteful consumption.
9. Discussion
"The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between
how nature works and the way people think." Gregory Bateson
Fig. 12. The Great Simplification (∼Point Z).
7
The dashed green line indicates future carrying capacity of sustainable flows
is less than it used to be, and declining by the year due to human pollution and
impact on natural systems
N.J. Hagens Ecological Economics 169 (2020) 106520
12

“When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence have
the capacity to shift the entire system” Ilya Prigogine
9.1. What next? Predictions for the superorganism
We can’t precisely predict the future, but we can increasingly be
confident of what won’t happen. Given the biological and social un-
derpinnings of growth and kicking the can described above, we can
hypothesize what scenarios are unlikely:
•Growing the global economy while simultaneously solving climate change
(reducing CO2) or avoiding a 6
th
mass extinction.
•Growing the economy while replacing hydrocarbons with low carbon
energy.
•Voting en masse to keep remaining carbon compounds in the ground.
•Leaders embracing or preparing for an end of growth before it happens.
To avoid paying the societal debt bill we’ve amassed over past
decades, we tend to keep kicking the can forward, with more financial
guarantees, stories, and rule changes – all in increasingly less sustain-
able ways. With the backdrop of the Superorganism we might make
some predictions:
•As more people recognize that energy underpins our futures, we’ll witness
more schemes focusing on gross energy as opposed to its net contribution
to society. Many technologies will be promoted that are viable, but not
relevant, affordable or scalable.
•We will continue to create money and credit expecting their abundance to
overcome physical world problems, until they too reach limits (no credit-
worthy lenders, interest too high of % of growth, fiscal cliffs, etc.).
•To avoid social instability, we will remediate wealth inequality via pro-
grams like Universal Basic Income (If such ‘wealth transfers’ are direct,
they will stabilize society but access more carbon as they are transfers of
bank digits to direct calls on resources and energy. (Good for low income
humans, bad for dolphins).(These transfers can be indirect e.g. ecological
restoration, local public infrastructure etc.)
•Around the world, as economic prospects deteriorate, people will foster
group cohesion by blaming their problems on outgroups, and tend to vote
for leaders who promise better economic futures, or things to be more like
the past, (linked to more economic growth, linked to energy, linked to
carbon). Trump, Bolsonaro, Matteo, LePen, Morrison, etc. are but recent
examples. (Conservative names listed, but most liberal types also promise
"better economic futures.").
•As USA and Brazil attest, one of the few remaining economic cans to kick
is de-regulation and removal of environmental protection. As the
economy gets worse, environmental initiatives (e.g. climate mitigation)
will become less popular – not because people disbelieve or care less but
because they’ll have less financial and emotional bandwidth to advocate
for them.
•As a globally tethered economic system, we will likely do anything we can
to kick the can further down the road. We are caught in a spiral of
growth, limits to growth, response to limits, more growth, more limits,
more response.
9.2. Cultural evolution and the superorganism
We are members of a social species collaborating at various scales to
execute optimal foraging algorithms in a novel, resource-rich environ-
ment. This results in a persistent, collective pursuit of economic growth.
This growth imperative is now accentuated by:
a) Creating currency not tethered to physical resources
b) not creating the ‘interest’ due when money is created and
c) increasingly using methods of finance to solve problems created by
finance.
Humankind, as a species, circa 2020 C.E., is ecologically functioning
as a mindless, energy dissipating structure. We could overcome this, but
will we? Events in coming decades will open up frozen cultural op-
portunities, but will occur stepwise. It is unlikely we’ll solve our en-
vironmental problems via new rules and pricing structures, while
keeping the risks of credit, limits to growth, social cohesion, and po-
pulism walled off. It is likely we will have to solve social and financial
problems first, before we can integrate longer time-horizon issues re-
lating to ecosystems and more benign cultural aspirations.
Humans have unwittingly been ensnared in the Carbon Trap –
whereby, to maintain our lifestyles and existence, we have to continue
burning the ancient carbon that is inexorably destroying the natural
world. No one is to blame for this trap but we are all complicit. We need
to retire our ∼500 billion strong fossil armies, but if we really did this,
it will transform our way of life in ways we are likely to resist.
The Superorganism framing of Homo sapiens appears unflattering,
yet it offers both clarity and hope. Understanding that humans in large
numbers predictably self-organize by following simple energy scaling
tropisms gives us a chance to visualize and prepare for what is likely to
happen (financial recalibration, less energy and material throughput,
more local economies, less carbon, etc.) This awareness empowers in-
dividuals and small groups to pursue creative paths of future mitigation
and planning outside of – or in parallel with – the aggregate human
Superorganism.
Finally, just as we discovered that we live in a heliocentric world,
and that we evolved, we now begin to see that we are part of a biolo-
gically emergent Superorganism which is de-facto eating the planet. If
we figure that out, what new pathways might it open up? Our biology is not
going to change – but our culture and our economic system could. How
will we use the coming financial/energy recalibration to move towards
a slower, wiser, less damaging system? What sorts of responses would
be beneficial? What sort of new stories do we need?
There is a recent trend in environmental media asserting climate
change is the primary systemic risk faced by civilization. One of the
points of this paper is to suggest that climate change is one symptom of
a much larger dysfunction. Multiple interrelated risks all point to an
impending, imposed reduction in energy/material throughput in
coming decades. There are 2 primary implications of this:
1) Societies need to physically and psychologically prepare for circum-
stances with less credit, complexity, energy/material throughput, and will
need social support structures for those falling off the treadmill, and
2) We need a science-linked blueprint describing how a new economic
system based on biophysical reality might emerge from this Great
Simplification –e.g. taxes on non-renewables (not only carbon but other
rapidly depleting resources), a reduction in the role of casino finance,
caps and floors on income, etc., all informed by the species-level view.
This is the small chink in the armor of the Superorganism. It is here that
we should aim the arrow of heterodox economic ideas and the research
agenda for Ecological (Systems) Economics for the next 30 years.
The concept of societal ‘collapse’ has now made its way into the
mainstream media (Kemp, 2019). The word ‘collapse’ imbues a finality.
It also sounds binary – yes or no. Our situation is much more nuanced,
geographically dispersed, and actionable. By kicking so many cans to
keep growing, we now face a bend or break scenario. We face a complex
challenge to avoid the ‘break’ by bending. This bending will comprise a
‘recoupling’ with nature and with each other, while using fewer non-
renewable resources. Physically this is possible. For example, a 30%
GDP drop in the USA would bring that nation back to a 1990′s level of
per capita GDP and a 50% drop in GDP would bring the USA back to a
1973 level.
The real challenge will begin when growth ends. Eventually, we
likely face a global depression and other challenging departures from
our recent trajectory. Those who understand and care about these
things, who have social support, a modicum of resources, and psycho-
logical health, have to step up. This is not a time to minimize our in-
dividual impact, which only makes us a smaller part of 1/8-billionth of
N.J. Hagens Ecological Economics 169 (2020) 106520
13

the Superorganism. Those who understand need to be effective at larger
scales. We need to maximize our impact during this liminal space for
Homo sapiens. The answers now are at least as much social as they are
technical.
10. Conclusion
“There is science now to construct the story of the journey we have made
on this Earth, the story that connects us with all beings. Right now we
need to remember that story — to harvest it and taste it. For we are in a
hard time. And it is knowledge of the bigger story that is going to carry us
through.” Joanna Macy
A bunch of mildly clever, highly social apes broke into a cookie jar
of fossil energy and have been throwing a party for the past 150 years.
The conditions at the party are incompatible with the biophysical rea-
lities of the planet. The party is about over and when morning comes,
radical changes to our way of living will be imposed. Some of the apes
must sober up (before morning) and create a plan that the rest of the
party-goers will agree to. But mildly clever, highly social apes neither
easily nor voluntarily make radical changes to their ways of living. And
so coffee and stimulants (credit, etc.) will be consumed during another
lavish breakfast, but with the shades drawn. It’s morning already.
It is likely that, in the not-too-distant future, the size, complexity,
and (literal) `burn rate' of our civilization will be much reduced by
forces other than human volition. This paper suggests that we will not
plan for this outcome – but we could react to it with airbags, social
cohesion, an ethos and prepared blueprints based on intelligent (and
wise) foresight.
What aspects of our current world can and should be preserved?
What can we do to make the path ahead less painful? How can we
nurture ecosystems and species, as well as the great body of human
culture and knowledge, so that they can, as far as possible, survive the
bottlenecks of the 21 st century? What really, could we aspire to be-
come as a species? Can we use science to guide us from mildly clever to
moderately wise? Can we tap into our wiring for group cooperation to
align ourselves with a purpose beyond turning trillions of barrels of
fossils into microliters of dopamine? What sort of economics will help
us ask, research and inform these questions?
Thirty years ago, ecological economics pioneered a systems ap-
proach to economics, but unfortunately became dominated by a
narrow, micro-focus on ecosystem services, monetary valuation and
conventional economics (Plumecocq, 2014). Whatever we’ll call it, we
are desperately in need of a set of guideposts and principles that include
not only ecology but also biology, psychology, physics and emergent
behaviors. This discipline will focus at least as much on 'what we’ll have
to do' as on 'what we should do'. And it will apply the evolving knowledge
of experts with a view to the maps and charts made by generalists.
Ecological economics was shaped as a next step from earlier classical
ideologies so as to consider the inclusion of sources and sinks. Over the
next 30 years, ecological economics must be both torchbearer for a
systems economics and midwife to a smaller flame.
Declaration of Competing Interest
There are no conflicts of interest with any of the content/materials
in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This paper is a product of the minds of many fellow hominids, alive
and from the past. The concepts and prose were heavily influenced by
two long-time collaborators: DJ White of Earthtrust.org and Hannes
Kunz of energyandstuff.org. Editorial thanks to Josh Farley, Rex
Weyler, Stefan and Jane Shoup, Philip Jensen, Herman Daly, John
Gowdy, Tad Patzek, Jeff Tomasi, Rune Likvern, Charlie Hall, John Day,
Peter Ward, Francois-Xavier Chevallerau, Kirk Smith, Art Berman,
David Fridley, Scott Endler, Sam Carmalt, Carley Rosefelt and probably
others I’ve forgotten. Thanks to three anonymous reviewers for much
helpful criticism and feedback.
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