Patrick Ophuls: "Energy, Politics, and The Future"
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
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The Consequences of Exponential Growth
We can no longer afford our existence as a civilization then only by accumulating a mountain of thermodynamic and economic debt that we've survived this long. The usual way of putting it is to say, well, we've overshot the carrying capacity or our global economic footprint is too large. But I like the idea of exponential growth better because you get a sense of something like a tsunami building up which is threatening to overwhelm you. It's usually illustrated graphically with a single line that shoots up to eternity. But a better way of grabbing it is if you have the exponential growth curves, two of them go out. And all of a sudden you have this rapidly expanding cone that looks like a giant
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