A New World Order: The Coming Transition from Fossil Fuels and Capitalism to Nuclear Energy and Eco-Socialism

This article describes a plan for establishing a long-term-sustainable planetary management system on Earth. The proposed system will enable humankind to live with a high level of freedom and without poverty in harmony with an ecologically rich biosphere.

The current global civilization based on a high level of human population and industrial production has proved disastrous both for mankind and the biosphere. Three-quarters of the human population – about six billion people – live in miserable conditions, enduring poverty, hunger, crowding, disease, oppression, limited freedom, limited access to nature, and lack of opportunities to lead meaningful lives and achieve a significant measure of fulfilment and happiness.

The mechanism by which human population has soared to biosphere-destroying levels is growth-based economic activity, implemented by capitalism. Growth-based economics / capitalism has proved to be the greatest weapon of mass destruction, exhibiting the power to destroy a planetary biosphere in less than two centuries. While growth-based economics / capitalism has played a key role in causing the current ecological crisis, it has at the same time been a tremendously powerful tool for advancing scientific and technical knowledge and technological development. The human population explosion has been accompanied by an explosion in knowledge. This knowledge represents the key both to understanding the nature of the crisis and to resolving it.

Growth-based economics / capitalism has caused the ecological crisis and simultaneously provided the means – science and technology – to resolve it. Through its phenomenal success in achieving truly astounding growth in industrial development and in knowledge, this system has sown the seeds of its own destruction. It has been extremely useful, but it has served its purpose and now poses an existential threat to the biosphere and to the human species. Mankind now possesses profound knowledge of the nature of the physical universe and sophisticated technology to interact with it.

To allow growth-based economics / capitalism to continue to operate will result in the annihilation of the species-rich biosphere, perpetuation of human misery, and, arguably, the extinction of the human species. For mankind to continue to exist, and to achieve a high-quality existence, the operation of this incredible system must now be halted, and it must be replaced with a system that enables mankind to live in harmony with a species-rich biosphere. Such a system is eco-socialism, implemented in the framework of steady-state economics.

This article presents a feasible plan for replacing the planet-destroying system of large-scale industry with a long-term-sustainable system of planetary management, of replacing growth-based economics / capitalism with steady-state economics and eco-socialism. The essence of the plan is to make use of the present system of growth-based economics / capitalism to make preparations for an immediate transition from that system to eco-socialism in the wake of a global catastrophe, such as economic collapse, social collapse, severe pandemic or famine, global nuclear war, ecological collapse, or radical climate change.

The new world order to be established will be designed, implemented, operated and maintained using the methodology of systems engineering. With this methodology, many alternative systems are synthesized, analyzed, evaluated and compared, and a preferred system selected.

The author, Joseph George Caldwell, has written extensively on energy and the environment for the past several decades. He holds a PhD in Statistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a BS in Mathematics from Carnegie-Mellon University.