The Tooth Fairy versus Thermodynamics

Part 5 of Looking down the barrel — the Tooth Fairy & the Dragon-King

Preamble

This is our 7th GB Post on the global demand for “something else”. To sum up previous posts, we have characterised this demand as multiple means:

To do transactions between anything/anyone and anything/anyone else in secure, safe and resilient ways, that involves the key features of currencies as units of account, exchange, and storage of value;

That would be interoperable between anything and anything else, in real time, with very low latency;

That could scale globally to many billion nodes and able to go well over 70G nodes beyond the 2030 time horizon; and

That would be anchored in, and backed with, sustainable installed power and related energy flows, specifically at the very points where energy is accessed and used, where people live and work and wherever they happen to go; and

Be overlaid onto an Internet that would also be thermodynamically viable;

In such a way as to be immune to the vagaries of the global financial system;

Not just in the short-term but also in the longer-run, well beyond the 2030 time horizon; and above all

Enable addressing the rapid loss of access to all present sources of energy that the globalised industrial world (the GIW) is facing since around 2012 — loss of access that is the most critical features of what we came to call the Oil Fizzle Dragon-King (OFDK).

The oil price crash of 2014 was the first strike of OFDK. OFDK is a very high probability abrupt process of high impact that nonetheless almost no one saw coming. OFDK is precipitating the end of the Oil Age over the 2012 and 2030 period. GB regards OFDK as the defining event of the 21st century. OFDK renders the accelerated simultaneous and interrelated development of cryptocurrencies and novel, highly distributed, networked means of access to sustainable forms of energy inescapable.

The present Posts focuses on OFDK’s fundamental causes, the very causes one must absolutely avoid repeating if one is to successfully seize the opportunity for something else that we identified in Posts 1 to 6. This is not an idle matter. We look into it because we mean business…

The big question

In Post 6 we explored the dynamics that gave rise to OFDK. This outlined answers to the how question: “How, the **** (expletive) did we get into this?” It did not answer the more fundamental question: “Why on earth did we create this mess?”

Thanks to Douglas Adams’ Deep Thought super computer, we know that the answer is 42… (See Post 3) So, with no time left for further improvisations or endlessly repeating past mistakes, before rushing towards solutions that may prove delusional, we must instead follow David Bohm’s advice and focus on what the appropriate question may actually be.

Let’s imagine a supra intelligent alien life form who has just arrived on Earth and is looking at the situation afresh… Let’s refer to our alien as “ish” (as in it/she/he) and call ish Al. Al is at once struck by the earthlings’ amazing achievements in terms of knowledge, medicine, technology, arts, and some exquisitely refined ways of living. After all, their genus is hardly 3 million years old. They have moved a long way since parting from chimps…

Yet, scanning in a flash through Zetabytes of data, publications, debates, TV news shows, policy documents, laws, regulations, international negotiations and treaties, books, reports, PhD theses, and more… Al is rather baffled by the countless number of urgent local or global issues plaguing earthlings:

Climate change, extreme climate events, unemployment, massive and ever increasing global debt, mass migrations, all manner of fundamentalisms, financial crises, widespread forms of terrorism and racism, drugs and drug cartels, plastics in the oceans, ocean acidifications, massive extinction of species and loss of biodiversity to the point of threatening the very survival of those earthlings, water stress extending to most of the planet, troposphere and stratospheric ozone matters, impact of trace persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and endocrine disturbing compounds (EDCs), forced marriage of over 700 million young girls, trending towards the billion, persistent slavery for tens of million earthlings, as well as over 4 billion earthlings without secure electricity supply or no electricity at all… And then, over 2 billion malnourished or actually starving and over 2 billion obese earthlings, rampant corruption, and many more and worse matters, all accompanied with relentless sycophantic celebrations of progress, innovation, growth, humanism…

Of course, Al readily recognises most leading decision-makers as being fairly intelligent individually. However, ish is all the more dumbfounded as ish can see that there have been for at least half an Earth’s century numerous earthlings who have been analysing those very same problems in exquisite detail… Al is even more bewildered that, without paying the slightest attention to those analyses and warnings, billions keep exploiting, violating, plundering, and destroying their very livelihood and their fellow earthlings in all kinds of sophisticated ways.

Ish can’t comprehend how they could do so with a kind of gay abandon, without for most of them the slightest sense of the utterly mad character of it all or even a shadow of guilt, all the while believing hard as steel that they are right in doing whatever it is that they are doing, blind to the evidence right in front of them.

And so, in amazement, Al reports back to base ish sharp conclusions as to what best characterises the GIW’s prevailing decision-making, that we may translate roughly into English as follows:

Moronic , from Greek moros, foolish, people with a mental age of 8–12, as in lacking intelligence in decision-making, unable to discern critically and judiciously;

, from Greek moros, foolish, people with a mental age of 8–12, as in lacking intelligence in decision-making, unable to discern critically and judiciously; Inane , from Latin inanis, empty, vain — as in acting in ways wholly disconnected from reality;

, from Latin inanis, empty, vain — as in acting in ways wholly disconnected from reality; Stupid , from root *(s)teu- to strike — as in “stunned mullet”, knocked on the head — as in the effects of mass media, individualised social media and politics on people’s minds;

, from root *(s)teu- to strike — as in “stunned mullet”, knocked on the head — as in the effects of mass media, individualised social media and politics on people’s minds; Idiotic , from Greek idiôtês, & Latin idiota, a self-interested, ignorant person — as in GIW’s dynamics isolating everyone and rendering them largely ignorant of what is actually going on;

, from Greek idiôtês, & Latin idiota, a self-interested, ignorant person — as in GIW’s dynamics isolating everyone and rendering them largely ignorant of what is actually going on; Imbecilic, from *bak-, stick, imbecillus, without a supporting stake, hence weak of body and mind, unable to withstand rigorous scrutiny — as in most present business and public decision-making.

This is what baffled Al most; how could so intelligent elites, leaders, key decision-makers, get themselves entangled in this kind of decision-making?

For sure Al’s observations are rather unpleasant for us earthlings — we tend to view ourselves are rather bright. However, if we dare face them, the unanswered big question that we must face is:

How and why has humankind placed itself on this moronic, inane, stupid, idiotic and imbecilic suicidal course?

Only in answering the question can we come to understand the unprecedented existential challenge that we face and find ways of responding to it effectively.

As for a coin, the Oil Fizzle Dragon-King has two inseparable sides. On one side, the Oil Fizzle concerns the physical dynamics at play. Addressing the Oil Fizzle pertains to the natural sciences. On the other side, the Dragon-King concerns the human, social and psychological dynamics at play. Like it or not, we face the “mother of all Dragon-Kings” because decision-making elites remained staunchly blind to and unconscious of what they were doing notwithstanding the numerous warnings addressed to them by a few of their fellow humans over the last 50 years or so. Addressing the DK side pertains to the social and human sciences. Both perspectives must be fully integrated. In what follows we consider the fundamental cause of the OFDK, that is, what caused this blindness.

Enter the Tooth Fairy

Figure 1 — The Tooth Fairy syndrome

Figure 1 quotes a somewhat exasperated remark by Bedford Hill in a WWW debate about the oil price crash of late 2014 and early 2015. GB felt it was so spot-on in characterising why fundamentally we ended up in the present mess.

Let’s listen a bit more to Hill:

“Many futures players still believe that petroleum is a magical substance… that drawing lines on a graph (using technical analysis)… will override the Laws of Physics. The reality is that the price of petroleum can be no greater than [the] value of the economic activity it can power, and depletion is continuously eroding that value… the day[s] of $100 oil [are] over — forever!” (B.W. Hill, 3–1–15)

“The petroleum industry is now in a downward spiral from which there is no escape… Oil has been the primary driver of economic growth for the last century… Without growth many of the institutions that we have become almost totally dependent upon will fail. Almost every facet of modern society will be adversely affected… A good time to take stock of our situation, and begin changing how we do things would be now!” (B.W. Hill, 2–2–15)

This is exactly what we are doing with this series of Posts and at GB… In the remainder of this and subsequent posts we will keep referring to the Tooth Fairy (TF, italicised to differentiated her from TF, transport fuels) to refer to the fundamental social and psychological causes for the present mess.

Let’s stress it again. Thermodynamics was pioneered in the early 1800s by people like Nicolas L. S. Carnot, James Watt, Lord Kelvin, James P. Joule and many others… Thermodynamics enabled the 19th century Industrial Revolution and all subsequent developments all the way to the Internet. It underpins the whole of physics. The entire wealth of the GIW is built on it. Without knowledge of it, 90% of humankind would not be alive today.

And yet, over two hundred years later, 100% of key decision-making still takes place outside thermodynamics’ ambit and instead remains steeped in magical thought, i.e. the belief in economics as a perpetual motion machine fantasy… that B.W. Hill referred to as the Tooth Fairy.

While net energy from oil was abundant, magical thinking did not matter. In the face of the Oil Fizzle DK it threatens humankind’s future. Only thermodynamically sound developments may address the vital challenges of the 21st century.

The Tooth Fairy syndrome has been known for decades. In 1981, US anthropologist Laura Nader and a member of GB were guest speakers at the 51st ANZAAS Congress, Brisbane, Australia. Both were presenting work on how societies actually deal with energy matters and energy crises, how people form opinions and attitudes concerning energy matters, how decision-makers think and decide about courses of action. They discovered that their findings overlapped and recouped fully. At the time, Nader’s work was more advanced. The title of her paper was “Magic, Science and Religion Revisited”.[1] In recent years, Nader had become part of US bodies overseeing responses to the first and second oil shocks and the US nuclear energy industry.[2] As an anthropologist she was initially taken aback by what she observed and proceeded to apply her anthropological skills to try and understand the weird “tribes” she had landed into.

The title of Nader’s paper was a wink at Malinowskyi’s famous work on the Trobriands in 1925. Malinowski had pointed out that:

“There are no people, however primitive without religion or magic. Nor are there… any savage races lacking either in the scientific attitude or in science though this lack has been frequently attributed to them.”[3]

Nader had observed that prevailing decision-making in the industrialised world she was living in was the outcome of a weird mix of “Magic, Science and Religion” with magical and mythical, quasi religious, thinking predominating among people who were viewed and who viewed themselves as rational and making scientifically-grounded decisions. GB’s member, a social scientist as well as an engineer, was engaged in very similar research, had observed exactly the same kind of phenomena in Australasia, Asia, the EU, the Americas and Africa.

Thirty-four years later Nader’s observations and analyses still stand. The very fact of the Oil Fizzle Dragon-King, i.e. the near total absence of decision-making grounded in sound thermodynamic analyses of complex systems operating far from equilibrium within industries that depend on viable thermodynamics for their very functioning demonstrates it. Magic and mythical thinking did not stop “magically” with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. In our globalised, supposedly emancipated modern or even post-modern societies, we can all still observe the same dangerous decision-making brew stubbornly comingling (at individual and collective levels) elements of science with wide ranging mythical and magical thinking in ways that are far remote from any systematic, rigorous, scientific, critical thinking perspective.

In fact this mythical thinking syndrome has grown much worse over the years. Since the 1980s new issues have emerged that current decision-makers have little experience or competencies to think through and deal with in a scientific/critical thinking fashion. Instead, the recourse to mythical thinking, especially of the economics kind, concerning debt, employment, resumption of growth, energy transitions, or climate change dominates even more now than ever before.

Paraphrasing Malinowski, we can summarise over 47 years of observations of decision-making within the GIW as:

There are no societies, however modern and benefiting from advanced science, who are free from believing in matters wholly disjointed from reality, and who are not systematically commingling bits and pieces of scientific knowledge with mythical and/or magical thinking… though rational decision-making has been frequently attributed to them.

Over the years a number of authors have reached similar conclusions, for example, internationally renowned anthropologist Edgar Morin:

1962 — “Mass culture deploys itself over the westernised world and, through its industrially produced myths, it weaves a neurotic adaptation and integration into reality — neurosis, a compromise between evil and reality, that is… paid with fantasies, myth and rituals without however suppressing the source of evil”.[4]

1975 — “If advanced societies pursue their course towards [consumerist] affluence, more and more they will discover the irrationality of rationalised existence, the atrophy of a life without true communication with others, without creative realisation, and with alienation into a world of objects and appearances…”[5]

Epistemologist, Paul Feyerabend, in his Against Method (1975), also noted that the GIW does not know how to handle scientific matters on their own terms, especially when they potentially affect human societies. Instead it first converts them to myth.[6]

Still steeped in mythical thinking and magic, GIW societies do the only thing they know how to do: they systematically recast scientific matters in mythical terms… Until, that is, reality comes home to roost, which it is in the process of doing right now.

The Tooth Fairy syndrome can be summarised as follows:

Thanks to the Tooth Fairy waiving her wand, oil shall appear magically as the result of ritual purchases of things (equipment, labour, etc…) paid with fiat money printed out of thin air (e.g. various kinds of debt, their derivatives and QE). This oil (and all other forms of energy) shall be accounted for purely in volumetric and financial terms in the total ignorance of thermodynamic fundamentals.

The Tooth Fairy rules over all of the present GIW’s decision-making. However, there is no way humankind may extricate itself from OFDK without first freeing itself from the Tooth Fairy syndrome.

The TF syndrome stems from believing. Believing is a feature of the human mind that posits “what is” in a fixed and absolute way, e.g. “I believe that the sun revolves around the Earth”.[7] Like anybody, individual scientists may believe in this or that. However, they all take part in relentless critique of each other’s work. Through critique, science unfolds entirely outside belief. It often meanders, yet it progresses by finding out what is false, incorrect, erroneous, or aberrant. It does so always provisionally, from specific standpoints, along given perspectives and courses of action — never in a fixed and absolute manner. The present consideration of OFDK takes place entirely outside belief and of the purview of the Tooth Fairy.

Since the species that was to become humankind parted company from the chimps some 6 to 7 million years ago, the emergence of consciousness has been a slow, protracted and uneven process. Modern consciousness emerged less than 3,000 years ago. It is a very recent phenomenon. The Tooth Fairy has been integral to it ever since. If this Tooth Fairy label appears childish, this is correct. The prevailing modern mind is still far from mature; still only partly conscious.

The Tooth Fairy syndrome has played a key role in the development of all civilisations since the breakdown of Bronze Age civilisations. The advent of modern science that enabled the industrial revolution did not eradicate it. Within the GIW, it manifests itself primarily as “economics” and fiat finance: the fantasy of a perpetual motion machine somewhat along Shadok lines…

The TF syndrome is now the main impediment to addressing OFDK. It could turn out lethal for much of humankind.

The growing gap between TF myth and reality

In Post 2 about Elephants in the cryptocurrency room we noted the chasm between value measured with the somewhat rubber-like and unreliable stick of fiat currencies and value measured with a tangible standard grounded in thermodynamics or with its proxy as gold. It is now time to revisit this matter.

Figure 2 — Mind the gap… The US case

Figure 2 to Figure 4 contrast wealth creation per head of population evaluated in fiat currency (GDP/head in US$) with wealth creation measured in terms of available net energy per average barrel of conventional crude. In each case, the contrast is striking.

Figure 2 presents the US case. For decades, wealth creation assessed in terms of GDP per head has grown fairly smoothly when considered in so-called “constant” dollars (green curve) with only relatively minor “blips”. The picture looks considerably different when GDP/head is evaluated in either grams of fine gold (yellow curve) or net energy per barrel (red curve). In the light of Posts 3 to 6 on OFDK, we can see clearly the impact of the Tooth Fairy. Under her sway all seems fine. Since 1900, the annual growth of wealth creation, assessed with the admittedly rough index of GDP/head, is amazing. However, actually wealth creation per head considered from a thermodynamic perspective is now significantly below what it was in 1900.

Figure 3 — Mind the gap… The French case

Figure 3 presents the French case, a mid size older industrial country. Looked at in terms of GDP/head in current US$ (blue line), wealth creation has progressed in more chaotic ways than in the US and it has not yet recovered from the 2008 global financial crisis. Measured in net energy terms the same pattern as for the US appears, peak in the early 1970s and present level similar to that of the US, below what it was at the beginning of the 20th century.

Figure 4 in turn, shows that the global situation is similar; same peak in the early 1970s followed with a more pronounced decline and presently a much lower level of wealth creation per head of global population.

Figure 4 — Mind the gap… The global situation

Since Post 2 and our hunt for Elephants in the cryptocurrency room, we have seen that OFDK is precipitating the abrupt end of the Oil Age and a global loss of access to all present sources of energy the GIW depends on. This means that wealth creation over the next 10 years is most unlikely to experience the kind of “rebound” seen during the 1980s and 90s on Figure 2 to Figure 4 — the energy that would be required to do so is simply no longer accessible.

In other words, under the sway of the Tooth Fairy, the GIW is now in irretrievable, acute, terminal thermodynamic decline. This decline is the basis for the global demand for something else.

Business-as-usual dynamics have massive negative impacts. We all know this. Many activists of various colorations oppose them and seek to correct them (e.g. concerning global warming and pollution of all kinds as well as concerning poverty, health matters, etc.). In GB’s view, there is no point in opposing or trying to “fix” the GIW, even in greenish or deep green ways. Now, under the full thrust of OFDK, the GIW’s dynamics are no longer opposable or “fixable”.

As we have seen in Post 3, Figure 1, the GIW is in the process of self-destructing under its own momentum. We now know that it is far too late to attempt to change the GIW’s course — the energy to achieve this is no longer available. The time to do this was in the early 1970s, when Limits to Growth was published and the large amount of energy required to do so was still in part available. Instead, now, the only sane course appears to be to let the GIW pursue its trajectory and to focus on addressing the global demand for something else, in full entrepreneurial fashion — major prior historical breakdowns have always been dealt with in this fashion. This is GB’s way.

Figure 5 — Global relativities

Although everyone and every country is subjected to OFDK, there are profound differences among countries in terms of the resources they have access to and above all their historical circumstances. All are far from equal in the face of OFDK. Which means that addressing the demand for something else is also a regional matter — it must adapt to each specific set of circumstances.

Figure 5 provides insights into major global differences. On Figure 5 GDP per head is assessed in terms of the average oil barrel as a unit of value. This is a rougher unit than the previous one focused on net energy per barrel. However, it was valid until around 2012 since up to that point the main driver for the price of oil was not yet net energy but the energy cost incurred by the oil industry in direct relation to the barrel extracted.

Figure 5 shows that in the 1980s Japan managed to catch up with the US in terms of wealth creation per head. In fact Japan is probably the sole developing country to have really managed the feat to durably reach the status of wholly industrialised country on a par with the older ones. Japan is now in terminal thermodynamic decline just as much as the US and the remainder of the GIW.

China on the other hand lags way behind notwithstanding its amazing industrial feats, the “development” of densely populated urban-industrial areas and its taking part in the GIW through its high export volumes. Only a fraction of China’s population benefits from this development. It has over 1 billion very poor people. Figure 5 shows that, in energy terms, China does not have the thermodynamic power to scale its westernized feats of development to its entire population. Given OFDK, it probably never will, bar a radical shift to something else than prevailing GIW-based development.

All other so-called “developing countries” or “emergents” (in effect “post-colonial” in one way or another) are in a similar situation. It is now too late for them to hope to ever catch the development band-wagon… the Tooth Fairy has lost her magic. OFDK rules. Development has never been but another word for the myth-based “growth” trajectory that lured first the older industrialised countries and then the entire GIW into the present mess.[8] It’s time to orient towards something else focused on novel means to access and use energy, a new class of networking and new means of transacting value in cryptocurrency mode, all sustainably and completely outside magical and mythical thinking. It can still be done. It leads to novel ways of sustainably living and doing business, highly profitably. GB is involved in doing it.

In our next posts we will review some of the main impacts that OFDK is precipitating, in falling domino mode. Each has a strong bearing on the potential shapes effective responses to OFDK and ways to address the corresponding demand for something else may take concerning new means to access and use energy, new class of networking and new means of transacting value in cryptocurrency mode, all sustainably.

* * * * * *

If you have followed our posts to this point, a reminder:

This series focuses on the emerging global demand for something else than what we currently have concerning energy and all other aspects of living in the globalised industrial world (the GIW). Most importantly it concerns money, the end of fiat currencies over the next few years and their unavoidable replacement with cryptocurrencies backed with sustainable energy supplies.

The posts gradually explain the rationale for the solutions that we are developing to address that global demand for something else. A subsequent series will explain our solutions themselves and our entire approach to creating a sustainable and scalable energy backed cryptocurrency.

GB’s next post will focus on OFDK’s causes and internal dynamics in order to refine further our something else specs concerning new means of access to energy, new class of networking and new means of transacting value.

GB’s previous posts in the demand for something else series are:

Post 1: Hello, this is GB…

Post 2: Elephants in the cryptocurrency room — current fiat currencies have no future; however, cryptocurrencies can’t scale to the global demand for something else; in particular they require far too much energy and are overlaid on top of an Internet also requiring far too much energy; and, like fiat currencies, they are disconnected from the sole reliable and necessary anchor of value into the thermodynamics of any social activity.

Post 3: Looking down the barrel — the Tooth Fairy and the Dragon-King; Part 1: Loss of access — humankind is rapidly losing access to all the sources of energy it depends on; the threats are dual, loss of access to bioenergy and loss of access to net energy from oil; those losses translate into loss of access to all other energy forms; Post 3 focuses on the loss of access to bioenergy; this loss will be complete by about 2030; this loss frames in stringent ways how to address the demand for something else, not just concerning energy but also all economic activity and all the way to finance and all currency matters.

Post 4: Looking down the barrel — Part 2 — The threat of an Oil Pearl Harbor — the oil price crash of late 2014 onwards marks the entry on the world scene of the Oil Fizzle Dragon-King (OFDK), a high probability, high impact process that almost no one saw coming; at the heart of OFDK is the rapid fizzling out of net energy from oil; net energy in the form of transport fuels is what enables the entire economic activity of the globalised industrial world (GIW); by about 2022 net energy per average barrel is expected to be about nil — zero net energy means zero value; in consequence oil prices are highly unlikely to ever recover durably; instead they are in the process of crashing to the floor — a kind of protracted Oil Pearl Harbor heralding the disintegration of the oil industry as we know it; which sets out the time frame for addressing the demand for something else.

Post 5: Looking down the barrel — Part 3 — The end of the Oil Age, as we knew it— this post examines the dynamics of the oil industry and of OFDK; it explains how and why the GIW entered the end of the Oil Age in about 2012 and how this process will be complete by about 2030; it then shows that an increasing number of industry and finance players have begun to intuit the dire situation and what are the implications for the GIW at large; it concludes in stressing that the oil industry is not going to vanish, as the GIW will keep requiring high energy density molecules for transport, and instead will have to transform drastically; which frames further the demand for something else. We also noted that under OFDK we cannot see how fiat currencies as we know them could survive much beyond 2022, which translates into a huge demand for cryptocurrencies able to scale past the size of fiat ones.

Post 6: Looking down the barrel — Part 4 — How is an Oil Fizzle Dragon-King created? — this post shows that the GIW is presently “running on empty”; it examines why, in consequence, while oil prices are crashing to the floor transport fuel prices can be expected to increase substantially and supply of transport fuels be increasingly erratic; examines how OFDK was engendered, where the present terminal dynamics lead and what are the defining energy characteristics of the demand for something else in response to ODFK. In short, OFDK forces a re-think of everything we do, especially what we take for granted, and most specifically a re-think of money, finance, currencies, investments and cryptocurrencies. In this matter we are not commenting from the sideline. We mean business… The opportunities at the heart of this re-think are simply huge. Just past the cusp of the “mother of all Senecas” we call this set of opportunities the Gold Spot.

[1] Nader, Laura, 1981, Energy and Equity, Magic, Science and Religion Revisited, 51st ANZAAS Congress, Brisbane.

[2] Nader was a member of the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems (CONAES). One study in particular, conducted at the University of California, focused on Distributed Energy Systems and California’s Future. It was spot on but alas way ahead of its time.

[3] Malinowski, Brownislav, 1948 Magic, Science and Religion and other essays, Glencoe, Illinois.

[4] Edgar Morin, 1962, L’esprit du temps — 1 Névrose [the spirit of the time — 1 neurosis], Grasset, Paris.

[5] Edgar Morin, 1975, L’esprit du temps — 2 Nécrose [the spirit of the time — 2 necrosis], Grasset, Paris.

[6] Feyerabend, Paul, 1975, Against Method, Verso, London.

[7] Apparently close to 25% of people in the US still do believe that the sun revolves around the Earth… The point here is that the negative statement, “the sun does not revolve around the Earth”, is not a belief since it does not state “what is” and is based on a large body of critical observations demonstrating that the belief in the sun revolving around the Earth is false.

[8] This also applies to “sustainable development”, which is nothing but an oxymoron — the logic of development, under the Tooth Fairy, is what led to OFDK; it is inherently unsustainable. John Foster has highlighted the dangers of sustainable development, presenting it as a mirage — by the time thirsty travellers realise that the lake they walked towards across the desert is a mirage, it is too late, they die of thirst — pursuing sustainable development would bring humankind further and further away from any sustainable life, with disastrous consequences (Foster, John, 2008, The Sustainability Mirage, Illusion and Reality in the Coming War on Climate Change, Earthscan, London, UK). Serge Latouche has also developed thorough critiques of development (Latouche, Serge, 1982, “Le Sous-Développement comme Forme d’Acculturation”, MAUSS, №2–4, Paris; Latouche, Serge, 1989, Underdevelopment is a Form of Deculturation, (Tranls. O’Connor), Department of Economics, University of Auckland, №62; Latouche, Serge, 1986, Faut-il refuser le Développement? [Must We Refuse Development?], PUF, Paris; Latouche, Serge, 1986, La transnationalisation et la Fin du Tiers Monde [Trans-nationalisation and the End of the Third World], IEDES, Paris; Latouche, Serge, 1986, The Ethical Implications of Development: A Philosophic Reflection on an Economic Process, IEDES, University of Paris, Patheon-Sorbonne; Latouche, Serge, 1987, “L’Etique du Développement” [The Ethics of Development], in MAUSS №24, Paris; Latouche, Serge, 1987, “Le Mythe du Développement à Crédit” [The Myth of Development on Credit], in MAUSS №24, Paris; Latouche, Serge, 1989, L’ Occidentalisation du Monde (The Westernisation of the World), La Découverte, Paris; Latouche, Serge, 1991, La Planète des Naufragés — Essai sur l’ Après-Développement, La Découverte, Paris, translated by M. O’Connor and R. Arnoux as In the Wake of the Affluent Society — An Exploration of Post-Development, London: Zed Books); Latouche, Serge, 2009, Farewell to growth, Polity Press; Latouche, Serge, 2–12, L’invention de l’économie, Albin Michel; Latouche, Serge and Jappe, Anselm, 2015, Pour en finir avec l’économie [To be done with economics], Editions Libre et solidaire.