I just watched this video with Bill Rees, an ecology professor at the University of British Columbia. Rees argues that we are reaching limits to growth due to decreasing availability and increasing cost of of fossil fuels.
Peak Oil evidently occurred in 2018.
https://crudeoilpeak.info/will-the-world-ever-reach-peak-crude-production-of-november-2018-again-part-1
I agree we are reaching limits due to climate warming, sea level rise, resource depletion, desertification, deforestation, decreasing biodiversity and other factors. But I don’t think it will lead to human extinction as many predict. Two factors that Rees did not mention are important.
URBANIZATION. Globally, we are moving from the farm with four or five kids into town where we can only afford only one or two kids. The declining fertility rate will cause there to be too many old people, consumers, and not enough young people, producers. This will cause a long recession of low or no growth. Pension funds will collapse and banks to go bankrupt. As the old people die off, population will peak, start to decline and stabilize at a lower level.
South Korea is a leading example of this. Peter Zeihan describes this process in his book “The End of the World is Just the Beginning”.
NUCLEAR POWER. To mitigate energy poverty, climate warming and resource depletion, we must replace fossil fuels with abundant, cost, zero-carbon fuel. The current fad is for wind and solar power but these “fuels” are weak, diffuse and intermittent. They require large amounts of land and materials and have large environmental impacts. These problems are reflected by their very low, single digit values of Energy Return on Energy Invested, EROEI. In contrast, fossil fuels have EROEI values of 10 to 30 and many nuclear reactors have values of 50 to 100.
https://www.daretothink.org/dfr-the-dual-fluid-reactor/
Small, modular reactors are being developed that can be assembled in factories and delivered by truck on site. Some of these will be fluid-fuel reactors which can have EROEI values in the thousands and be a game changer. I imagine tens of thousands of them would be installed globally to provide abundant, reliable, inexpensive electricity and energy independence in all countries and not be dependent on the politics of distant lands.
The constraint isn't on resources, per se. While there are a finite number of atoms in the universe, ideas are infinite. Ideas enable us to arrange atoms in different, more useful ways. Human growth and progress, as I noted at Risk+Progress, can actually reduce environmental impact over time.
We saw this in forestry coverage, where development led to increased greenery. We see this with pollution, where the skies of London, for example, once choked with smog and coal dust, are now clear. As the price of fossil fuels climbs, that will send signals to consumers and businesses that other alternatives are required. We are also seeing evidence, as noted here, of peak oil, and we reached peak coal sometime ago.
This, however, assumes continued "progress" and innovation. Paradoxically, I think a shrinking global population will inhibit progress and is more likely to trap humanity within a hopeless dependence on fossil fuels, more so than it is likely to help solve the problem of climate change or environmental challenges. I explored why here: https://www.lianeon.org/p/we-dont-have-enough-people