Blip: Humanity’s 300 Year Self-Terminating Experiment with Industrialism, by Christopher O. Clugston. (Booklocker.com, 2019, ISBN 978-1644380680). 392 pp. Softcover, $19.95.

Free Inquiry prefers to review books from major publishers. Now and again, we make an exception.

Readers who recall my review of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming by David Wallace-Wells (October/November 2019) know I’m pessimistic about humanity’s prospects for surviving the current climate crisis. Christopher O. Clugston’s Blip supplies another, almost entirely independent, grounds for gloom. After a career in the electronics industry, Clugston threw himself into sustained independent study of a little-considered form of sustainability: geological sustainability. (He wrote a previous book, Scarcity: Humanity’s Final Chapter? [2012] and contributed the article “Humanity vs. Nature—Winner Take All!” to the June/July 2015 Free Inquiry.)

Clugston’s thesis is simple and terrifying. He argues that humanity is on the threshold of exhausting economically extractable deposits of most nonrenewable raw materials. Never mind “peak oil”; Clugston thinks we’ve passed peak damned near everything—so much so that in Blip he predicts the collapse of human society by 2050, driven by overwhelming shortages of essential raw materials. The “blip” of the title is human industrial civilization, a roughly 300-year anomaly of exuberance that began when humans learned to multiply their power by exploiting nonrenewable natural resources (NNRs) on a large scale—which will quickly end when our NNR habit can no longer be supported.

Alarmist? Perhaps. And … perhaps not. The book is a bit forbidding; Clugston’s prose is dry and sometimes clunky, as engineering writing sometimes is. But the array of references he cites is little short of overwhelming. One comes away thinking hollowly, What if he’s right?

Clugston foresees a different sort of apocalypse than Wallace-Wells did in The Uninhabitable Earth. For Wallace-Wells, the sins of the Industrial Revolution count for little, as I wrote in my review:

… the damage done to Spaceship Earth by the Industrial Revolution, the Gilded Age, and even the two World Wars was relatively modest. The biosphere absorbed those insults with limited consequence because only some humans were perpetrating them and because humanity’s absolute numbers were still relatively small. The assault that’s now overwhelming Mother Nature took shape only in the second half of the twentieth century, as human numbers raced toward, then passed, seven billion and as the developing world began to consume and pollute to a degree previously open only to the “privileged” West and as its people began to reach for American standards of personal abundance.

For Clugston, in contrast, the damage really did begin with “Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine and swelled steadily ever since,” as I wrote in my review of Wallace-Wells. First, England exhausted many of its own NNRs and had to start importing them. America industrialized later, but soon enough it too ran through much of its native NNR bounty. Unlike Wallace-Wells, Clugston might not mind if we indulge in some “guilt about how much damage our great-great-great-great-grandparents did clear-cutting forests to fuel early steam locomotives.” Of course, today industrial civilization spans the globe. When current essential nonrenewable resources run out, there may be no “out there” left from which to import new supplies. Whereupon the “blip” of industrialism will end, as it always had to.

Clugston’s grim scenario makes sense out of certain anomalies we tend to forget. Think back to just before the financial meltdown, near the end of 2007. Economies were booming all over the world, all at once. Key materials started going into critically short supply. Americans will recall $4.50-per-gallon gas and a copper market so overheated that not only abandoned buildings but those not carefully guarded were regularly stripped of their copper piping and fixtures. There was similar, if less visible, chaos in industrial sectors as essential materials went into shortage one by one. Meanwhile, key renewable resource markets were little better; Mexico saw food riots over the price of corn because so much corn was being diverted to make biofuels in the United States. I’m only scratching the surface.

We tend to forget this episode because, in late 2007, the real-estate bubble collapsed, sparking the worldwide financial meltdown. Clugston thinks this was a direct result of the shortages; others believe they’re not connected. Either way, the meltdown pulled back on the throttles of industrial demand. The shortages abated—but the meltdown then consumed so much attention that any lessons the shortages might have taught us were lost.

Since then, we’ve had a decade of “growth” that’s been halting and irregularly distributed and that hasn’t led to wage gains for many who were hurt by the meltdown—despite a historically unprecedented decade of near-zero interest rates. Nor has it brought industrial resource consumption back to mid-2007 levels. Why so little growth with so much stimulus? Clugston argues that key resources are already going into terminal decline. We’re already paying more and more to extract resources of ever-lower quality. Technical ingenuity can go only so far; before too long, the center will not hold. [This was written before the coronavirus lockdown. —Eds.]

The pessimists among us can choose their apocalypse, then. Wallace-Wells foresees an Earth that can support only a fraction of current human numbers by, say, 2100 or so. The culprit will be temperature, and Wallace-Wells goes to great if sometimes unconvincing lengths to insist that the shattered future he foresees is still preventable. Clugston foresees a cataclysm by about 2050, driven by the sudden unavailability of multiple key nonrenewable resources—or at least, by their unavailability in the quantities and at the costs required to keep our industrial behemoth humming. And given human nature, he sees no way out.

One subtext that gets too little attention by both writers: if only humanity had done more to reduce human numbers when concerns about overpopulation first became widespread in the 1960s—if only today there were, oh, three billion of us instead of nearly eight billion. We’d have ever so much more elbow room under Wallace-Wells’s scenario—and Clugston’s.