NASA study: Radical Ecologists Have a Point
Published at 21:09 on 18 March 2014
That’s basically the executive summary of this article.
Particularly trenchant is the role that the authoritarian class hierarchy of civilization plays in helping to facilitate the collapse:
In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most “detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners”, allowing them to “continue ‘business as usual’ despite the impending catastrophe.” The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how “historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases).”
And technology offers no quick fix:
Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use.