How should we respond to the challenges of Worldview Two – climate change, peak oil, soil and ocean issues, as well as economic and community challenges? A bunch of us are getting together in La Conner, WA (between Seattle and Vancouver BC) on October 9, 2016, to talk about this, and you’re invited! Here’s a copy of a flyer so you can learn more and see how to sign up:
[May 9, 2019 – we had this conference, and the conversation was valuable. Contact me if you’d like to learn more!]
According to the government, the oil industry, and the media, the outlook for oil supplies, especially in the US, are better than they have been for decades. The challenge seems to be what are we going to do with it all.
Reality, however, reveals a different story, but one that resists a one-line summary. To understand what’s ahead, we have to understand the role of energy in the economy, the nature of oil, and the many challenges facing future supply adequacy. The old debate on “peak oil” centered around predicting the date when extraction would begin to decline, but we’ve all learned there is more to it. We will never “run out of oil,” but as supplies become harder and more expensive to extract, the ability of society to afford to use it will decline.
I recently wrote a piece called “Oil Abundance? Not So Fast” for, and in collaboration with, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil – USA. It appears in the “publications” section of this blog, and here. [PDF]
If you’re involved in the oil discussion in any way, I encourage you to read this for an overview of all the issue involved.
Professionals who give advice (as opposed to treating current problems) need to be able to talk about time and help their clients envision the future they will be living in. This is true for financial planners, physicians, nutritionists, clergy, and even landscape architects. In order to help someone create their best possible future, there’s a need to project how what can be done today might turn out in a decade or two.
The Worldview Two challenge arises when the next twenty years are likely to be very different from how the last decades have turned out. It was a good idea to build a beach house before, but probably not so much today. The plants that flourished in a garden in the Twentieth Century might not do so well with new weather patterns.
Financially, I believe we have entered a period when economic growth as a reliable trend is “over.” This follows both from the limits in real resources, especially energy, and from the limits imposed by climate change. Expecting invest returns to “revert to the mean” will probably lead to disappointment or worse.
I had the opportunity to speak on The End of Growth at the recent national Retreat of the Financial Planning Association in Palm Springs (a place with a questionable future in a future without enough energy or water, though it has lots of sun). If you click on the Publications tab on this website, you can see my slides from that talk and read some other articles I’ve written for the financial planning community.
It’s important for individuals to prepare for a future without material growth, and for advisors to help create meaningful futures in that environment.
Welcome to Worldview Two, where we explore how the expectations and assumptions we’ve developed over the past two centuries need to be replaced by a better understanding of what is happening today and coming tomorrow. If you explore the website, you can learn about the nature of the resource limits we face and how they create a massive challenge to business as usual. Continue reading Welcome to the Blog