Point No. 6 Driving a Positive Feedback Loop

Point 6 Driving a Positive Feedback Loop

As discussed before Feedback loops works can be a positive or negative.  A positive feedback loop strengthens and accelerates the dynamic while a negative feedback loop tries to regulate the system in order weaken the strength of the dynamic. For example, Climate change can be subject to both positive and negative feedback loops.

A positive feedback loop is self-reinforcing. The more it works, the more it gains

power to work some more. The more people catch the flu, the more they infect other people. The more babies are born, the more people grow up to have babies. The more money you have in the bank, the more interest you earn, the more money you have in the bank. The more the soil erodes, the less vegetation it can support, the fewer roots and leaves to soften rain and runoff, the more soil erodes. The more high-energy neutrons in the critical mass, the more they knock into nuclei and generate more. Climate Change is a positive feedback loop. The more the climate change the more sever impacts on the planet earth occurs.

Positive feedback loops drive growth, explosion, erosion, and collapse in systems. A system with an unchecked positive loop ultimately will destroy itself. That's why there are so few of them. Usually a negative loop kicks in sooner or later. The epidemic runs out of infectable people—or people take increasingly strong steps to avoid being infected. The death rate rises to equal the birth rate—or people see the consequences of unchecked population growth and have fewer babies. The soil erodes away to bedrock, and after a million years the bedrock crumbles into new soil—or people put up check dams and plant trees. In those examples, the first outcome is what happens if the positive loop runs its course, the second is what happens if there's an intervention to reduce its power. CO2 Emissions reduction is such an adaptation to try to use a negative feedback loop to regulate climate system change.  However, Reducing the gain around a positive loop—slowing the growth—is usually a more powerful leverage point in systems than strengthening negative loops, and much preferable to letting the positive loop run. Population and economic growth rates in the world model are leverage points, because slowing them gives the many negative loops, through technology and markets and other forms of adaptation, time to function. It's the same as slowing the car when you're driving too fast, rather than calling for more responsive brakes or technical advances in steering. All the negative loops that are attempting to reduce CO2 emissions such as Carbon Pricing, Cap & Trade, Net Zero Targets for countries and corporations, Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) to name a few are adaptions that are slow to function. Currently the negative feedback loops adaptation that we are implementing is slow and creating an ever-increasing gap in helping the Net Zero objective. One of the most touted solutions is the reforestation of land and turning it into trees for later cutting and using as wooden pallets, this is called the conventional carbon removal solutions as part of land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) activities – principally through afforestation/reforestation. These solutions may have a socio-economic impact on populations that are included in the most impacted people on the plant.

There is a major concern that the CO2 emissions gap is widening as not all countries have identified targets per the Paris Agreement for Nationally Disclosed Commitments. See map below updated July 2024. As you can see the appetite for CO2 emissions reduction by countries so far is not very high as these adaptions are considered costly and long term.

The most interesting behavior that rapidly turning positive loops can trigger is chaos. This wild, unpredictable, unreplicable, and yet bounded behavior happens when a system starts changing much, much faster than its negative loops can react to it. For example, if you keep raising the capital growth rate in the world model, eventually you get to a point where one tiny increase more will shift the economy from exponential growth to oscillation. Another nudge upward gives the oscillation a double beat. And just the tiniest further nudge sends it into chaos.

 I don't expect the world economy to turn chaotic any time soon (not due to climate change, anyway), however, if there “business as usual” mode of operations by countries, and corporations continue the same way, you can expect civic unrest and barbarism. That behavior occurs only in unrealistic parameter ranges, equivalent to doubling the size of the economy within a year.  But, if you look at the global economic growth over a long span you will find that we are pushing the envelope on the earth planetary systems in an hyperbolic way. We have pushed outside the planetary limits on 6 out of the 9 parameters.   The extraction of materials resources has in fact been stepped up through out the world since per-industrial era and tripled since 1970s. See Fossil Fuels Consumption trajectory below, it is a indicator of materials extraction.

Real-world systems do turn chaotic, however, if something in them can grow or decline very fast. Fast-replicating bacteria or insect populations, very infectious epidemics, wild speculative bubbles in money systems, neutron fluxes in the guts of nuclear power plants. These systems are hard to control, and control must involve slowing down the positive feedbacks. In more ordinary systems, look for leverage points around birth rates, interest rates, erosion rates, "success to the successful" loops, any place where the more you have of something, the more you have the possibility of having more. Slowing down this positive feedback loop means we need to reduce consumption.

Consumption (referred to as aggregate economic demand), that is consumption plus investment plus government and (not simply consumer spending). Consumption is the main driver of ecological impacts including climate change.

The demand of goods and services comes with a baggage of both visible and invisible resources, meaning any product or services involves the use of the materials it is made of and the materials necessary for its manufacturing of products or delivery of services. Take for example, buying an item from Amazon, the item is manufactured using materials that was mined elsewhere, using energy that consumed any source of energy whether it is fossil fuels or renewable fuels, and made by labor. Then this item is packaged using packaging materials and using laborers driving combustion engine trucks. This is not to mention the water consumed, the waste produced, transported, and sent to the landfill. All our daily activities is tied to a particular level of resource and energy consumption.