Wishing for Collapse: The Unintended Path of Depletionism
In "The Monkey’s Paw" by W.W. Jacobs (1902), an elderly couple receives a magical monkey’s paw that grants three wishes. They wish for money, but it comes through their son’s death in an accident. Then, they ask to have their son back, but he comes in the form of a decayed corpse clumsily walking home. Finally, they ask to send the zombie back to its grave. It is a typical problem: when you ask for something, you never know what you’ll get, and you may not like it. It is happening now for a group of vocal “depletionists” who are loudly proclaiming that we are running out of vital resources for the industrial system and that we need to scale it down. They are basically right, but if the message passes, we won’t see that happening — much worse outcomes are probable.
This post is inspired by a talk i gave in Budapest at the World Adaptation Forum on April 25, 2025. h/t Balazs Stumpf-Biro.
It is said that George W. Bush Jr. decided to invade Iraq in 2003 because he had read some papers on oil depletion by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO). Of course, it may be just a legend, but I don’t see it as impossible, and perhaps not even improbable. Politicians make decisions on the basis of a “blob” of vague ideas that they keep in mind, often on the spur of the moment, and in many cases making terrible mistakes. But they normally have in mind some of the critical elements that keep alive the system they manage. For the US, it was, and still is, crude oil. So, it is possible that Bush thought that it was necessary to compensate for the decline of the US oil production by seizing the Iraqi resources. That didn’t necessarily imply the need to start a war, just like filling the tank of your car doesn’t imply shooting dead the service station operator. But that’s the way some people’s minds work.
ASPO had a certain global clout during the first 1-2 decades of the century. It was created in 2001 by a group of oil geologists. It was a group of scientists, mainly oil geologists, who were engaged in the study of oil depletion. It was the founder, Colin Campbell, who came out with the expression “Peak Oil,” which became popular over the years. I was part of the association from the early years, so I know the story well. It was a subset of a wider approach to the effects of resource depletion that had started with the “Limits to Growth” study of 1972.
ASPO’s work was focused on determining when the global oil production peak would arrive, leading to a disaster of global proportions. Of what would be desirable to do to avoid it, ASPO members were divided among different internal currents. Some saw a return to nuclear energy (mainly the French members), others a return to coal (the US ones), and a wide group thought of socialism/degrowth/green utopia.”
As you may have imagined, we obtained nothing of what we were thinking should be done. Actually, we obtained exactly the opposite. Although ASPO’s ideas were always denied and considered fringe opinions, the oil industry and people in the financial/political world were acutely aware of the increased costs of oil production. Their reaction was predictable when you think that these people think mainly in terms of profits. If oil is becoming scarce, then it will become more valuable. Then, it makes sense to invest in it. So it was that huge (and I mean really huuuuge — Trump style) amounts of money were thrown at the idea of exploiting “tight oil,” better known today as “shale oil.” A resource that most oil geologists had always considered too expensive to exploit, but when money speaks louder than the voice of geologists.
And so, shale oil was, and Peak Oil was postponed by at least 10 years, although at a big cost for the economy and with huge (huuuge) damage to the ecosystem. And the work of ASPO was consigned forever to the dustbin of wrong scientific theories proposed by cranks. Actually, the peak may be coming now, but what was done was done.
The interesting point of this story is how it is repeated in a very similar form today. We are seeing a vocal group of people whom we can call “depletionists,” equivalent to the earlier “ASPOists” who claim that we are running out of some critical resources for the industrial system and that the whole system may collapse soon. They are basically right: I think I was one of the initiators of this movement of ideas with my book “Extracted,” which I published in 2014. The problem is the same as that of ASPO: the depletionists don’t have a solution to avoid the disaster they predict will happen in the near future. That is, no solution except a set of vague ideas, again similar to what ASPO was proposing, about “degrowth,” bicycling, cultivating vegetables in one’s garden, and maybe adopting socialism.
Admirable, but it won’t work.
Actually, it will badly backfire, especially if the depletionists continue their work of carpet bombing against renewable energy and electrification — the so-called “renewable transition”. It is true that the transition requires mineral resources, but not necessarily rare ones, and their criticism is often shallow and sometimes plainly wrong. A takedown of their criticism can be read in a recent post by Nafeez Ahmed, “The Delusion of no Energy Transition.” But the worst problem is not so much the misunderstanding of the technical characteristics of renewable energy. It is the same problem we had with ASPO.
It is not enough to highlight a problem if you don’t propose actionable ways to solve it.
People need energy. People need electricity, shelter, transportation, and more. And, of course, food. Renewable energy doesn’t automatically provide all that, but it is a big help, especially for the poor. Just as an example, think about how badly air conditioning is needed in Southern countries nowadays. PV panels can provide it at no cost during the hottest periods of the day, exactly when the panels work at the highest efficiency. And PV can provide food refrigeration, basic transportation, and more.
But if you keep telling people that renewables are useless, people will search for something else, and, no, it will not be Socialism. It will be a new rush for miracles (nuclear fusion), for whatever dirty things can burn (coal), for destroying the ecosystem even more (bioenergy), and the rich can think of even worse things.
About these “worse things,” I won’t go into the details. Let me just show you the front cover of my latest book titled “Exterminations,” and I leave it to you to understand where we may be going. Be careful with what you ask for, because you may get it in a form that you won’t like.
https://www.amazon.com/Exterminations-Ugo-Bardi/dp/B0DK18GP68/
