by IAN ANGUS
If hundreds of newspaper and online reports are to be believed, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Agency have proven that western civilization will collapse unless we radically reduce inequality and shift to renewable resources.
That would be important news if it were true. Is it?
The first person to say so was Nafeez Ahmed, a self-described “investigative journalist and international security scholar” whose blog is hosted by the UK Guardian. On March 14 he described an unpublished “NASA-sponsored study” that, he said, showed that “global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.”
Ahmed called the paper “a highly credible wake-up call to governments, corporations and business — and consumers — to recognize that ‘business as usual’ cannot be sustained, and that policy and structural changes are required immediately.”1
And the frenzy began. In two days, Ahmed’s article was tweeted 6,500 times and shared 100,000 times on Facebook. The mainstream press ran headlines like these:
- “NASA Predicts the End of Western Civilization” (New York Post)
- “The Utter Collapse of Human Civilization Will Be ‘Difficult to Avoid,’ NASA Funded Study Says” (National Post)
- “NASA-funded Report Says Society Is Trending Toward Big Collapse” (Houston Chronicle)
- “NASA-funded Study Warns of Collapse of Civilization in Coming Decades” (Independent)
Most reporters simply quoted Ahmed’s blog, not bothering to read the original study. Liberal and leftish writers did so enthusiastically, while right-wingers fulminated at NASA’s anti-capitalist collectivism. If they had done their jobs and gone to the source, we might have been spared a lot of scare headlines, unwarranted praise, and outraged denunciations.
Because there is much less here than meets the eye.
On March 20, NASA publicly denied that it had “solicited, directed or reviewed” the paper, calling it “an independent study by the university researchers utilizing research tools developed for a separate NASA activity.”2
The paper is signed by three U.S. academics. Lead author Safa Motesharrei is a PhD candidate in mathematics and public policy at the University of Maryland; his co-authors, Eugenia Kalnay and Jorge Rivas, are professors at the University of Maryland and the University of Minnesota, respectively. The only connection to NASA anyone has identified is a general research grant NASA gave to Professor Kalnay’s department.
If the original blog post had made that clear, the study wouldn’t have attracted much attention — as the headlines show, it was the supposed NASA connection that drew media interest.
Normally I’d ignore a paper like this: many graduate students write papers, some get published, and most are quickly forgotten. But this one has been widely publicized, so it requires review, if only to understand its argument. After all, if the authors really have proved that western civilization is on the brink of collapse that only greater equality and a shift to renewables can prevent, ecosocialists should be eager to publicize it!
…
There is massive evidence that the existing social order is inflicting massive harm on humanity and the rest of nature, and the case for radical social change as the only permanent solution is very strong. The authors of the HANDY Model deserve respect and commendation for focusing on that, and for including social inequality as an important factor. My criticism of their work has nothing in common with the reactionaries and science-deniers who have loudly condemned them as dangerous radicals.
The problem is not that “Human and Nature Dynamics” is radical, but that it is not. Radical means going to the root, but this analysis remains on the surface, dealing with appearances, with things that can be counted and plugged into formulas. Not society but population; not nature but eco-Dollars; not history and class struggle, but graphs. Ahistorical formulas substitute for investigation of the specific social, economic, cultural, and technological processes that have brought our particular society to this time of crisis.
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