TL;DR
Ecological overshoot reads as a morality tale. It needs a guilty corporation, a government, a consumer before anyone will act. Overshoot is instead a fossil fuel pulse hitting a brain built to find a face for every harm, inside a system that answers to thermodynamics, not ethics. The instinct that once policed a small tribal band now hunts for villains when the cause is diffuse, delayed and collective. But because blame feels like justice, it works like a sedative, discharging shame while blocking the systems thinking that shifts outcomes. The failure is one of scale, not virtue. Nobody’s fault doesn’t mean overshoot is nobody’s problem.
My mate Joe came into the bar at the country club, sweat pouring from his brow and tidemarks on his golf shirt that was supposed to have quick wick technology. He waved across at us and got the standard nod from the assembled to order a round.
“How’d you go?” I ask as the drinks arrive.
“Those fat grips. Bloody terrible things, every shot went left. Baz will have to take them off. He should never have told me to change them. Last lesson he’ll ever get from me.”
Blame. You can’t escape it. It’s in every feed, every media outlet, and every conversation that has ever happened in a bar after a round of golf.
It begins as a moral judgement. Something goes wrong, and we instantly attach fault to a person, an institution, or to a thing and on bewilderingly rare occasions, to ourselves. And it is not a calm, neutral diagnosis because we really get into it, and blame hard so that it’s believable to everyone.
It’s psychology 101 really. When things go wrong we feel the heavy emotions of hurt, fear, shame, and powerlessness. Blame performs the handy function of turning those vulnerable states into anger, and anger feels so much stronger. It has agency and we latch onto it.
We feel even better if we over-attribute other people’s failures to their character and not the situation; a neat cognitive shortcut. If I am late, the traffic was dreadful. If you are late, you are careless and should have left home earlier. Rather than go to the trouble of untangling context or, heaven forbid, taking responsibility, it is mentally cheaper to label someone as flawed. So we think fast and simplify, which easily hardens into judgement.
And there is another deeper comfort in blame, too. Many of us carry an unspoken belief that the world is fair, meaning that good outcomes track good behaviour. So when misfortune strikes, blaming the victim restores that illusion of order. If it was their mistake, then we are safe as long as we avoid the mistake they made. This story protects us from randomness and, again, reinforces feelings of control.
And then there is blame’s emotional sibling shame, the painful feeling that I am fundamentally flawed or somehow bad. For some, admitting a mistake does not register as I did something wrong, but as I am wrong. And to avoid that collapse of identity, the mind deflects. If it is your fault, it cannot be mine. Blame can be a sound shield against shame if I can make my mistake your fault, so I don’t have to feel the searing heat of shame that comes with believing it might be mine. Blaming becomes an exquisite act of self-preservation. My ego survives.
As Brené Brown puts it, blame is the discharge of discomfort, and it runs in the opposite direction to accountability. It looks backward and asks whom to punish, which makes it reactive, aggressive, and tends to corrode trust. Accountability, the logical counter that brings in responsibility, looks forward and asks what now. Unlike blame, it is measured and uncomfortable because it requires vulnerability. But it takes effort and courage.
If you have read any of the Mindful Sceptic essays, you will know where this is going. Blame is one of the biggest comforting myths there is, and it’s embedded in professional orthodoxies like concrete. And it has protected us from accountability for our individual and collective actions, we are going to need a jackhammer to dislodge its grip.
Let’s begin with the standard idea that environmental damage has nothing to do with me.
Mainstream environmental discourse assumes ecological degradation is primarily due to identifiable moral failings of corporations, governments, consumers, or economic systems, and that assigning blame is a prerequisite for meaningful action.
Environmental debate typically involves climate criminals, corporate greed, irresponsible consumers, government betrayal, and systemic injustice. Across the political spectrum, ecological harm is about bad actors making bad choices. The mining company really has to stop that leaky tailings dam from wrecking the wetland. Let’s ask them to clean it up and give them a hefty fine if they don’t. The assumption is that if we can identify the guilty party, pressure or punish them, the problem can be solved.
A challenge with this, even if there are bad actors, is that policy debates become more polarised when issues are cast in terms of blame and virtue rather than shared risk and trade-offs. Studies by Jonathan Haidt and colleagues on moral foundations’ theory suggest that individuals interpret complex policy problems through intuitive moral lenses of fairness, loyalty, authority, and harm before engaging in analytical reasoning. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution become stories about villains and victims. Once it’s a moral problem it is easy to identify the villains, my tribe obviously has fewer emissions than yours.
Analyses of climate coverage in the United States and Europe show that reporting is usually about fossil fuel companies versus activists, governments versus citizens, developed versus developing nations. Attribution of responsibility dominates headlines, while structural drivers such as energy dependence, infrastructure lock-in, and thermodynamic constraints receive far less attention. Indeed, on mindful sceptics we have argued at length that blindness to the laws of nature and their consequences is an epidemic. But for the media outlets and their viewers it works perfectly because the effect is to specify onto a person, or some recognisable entity, distributed and systemic processes.
Surveys consistently show that people see corporate behaviour or government failure as primary causes of environmental decline, while far fewer identify energy density, population scale, or infrastructural design as core drivers. On the rare occasions systems thinking happens, the thoughts are often translated as someone should have stopped this. Someone failed.
There is a logic and ubiquity to this blame.
Many modern legal and ethical systems are predicated on identifying a responsible party. It is much easier and morally satisfying if someone is in the dock. But environmental degradation at planetary scale is not the product of a single decision-maker. It is the cumulative outcome of billions of ordinary actions embedded within energy-intensive systems developed over centuries. When discourse begins with blame as its organising principle, it lets me, with my ordinary and perfectly legal actions, off the hook.
But here we are with mainstream environmental discourse that treats ecological breakdown as moral failure, and assumes that finding and confronting the guilty party is a necessary first step toward action. And there are times when this works as it should. Maybe the mining company did skimp on the tailings dam construction that failed in the first flood event. It’s not that responsibility is irrelevant, but it can too easily substitute for the detailed analysis that would identify the actual causes.
George Marshall, founder of Climate Outreach and author of Don’t Even Think About It, argues that abstract systemic explanations fail to engage people emotionally, and that effective climate communication requires personal stories, identifiable messengers, and vivid emotional connection. Easily done with a bit of blame. Per Espen Stoknes, the psychologist and economist whose five-strategy framework is now taught in communication programs around the world, makes the same case in What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming. Climate messaging must be social, story-based, and emotionally immediate to override the psychological barriers that drive disengagement. The emerging consensus, repeated in workshops, NGO strategy papers, and communications research, holds that abstract critical thinking about a global problem produces disengagement, while personalised moral narratives produce action.
Not all stories include blame, but personalised stories travel further than systemic analysis. However, what works to communicate a message and what works to solve the problem may not be the same thing. A Duke University study found that climate framing which personalises blame failed to persuade sceptics and triggered a significant backfire effect, polarising the audience further. The more a message names a moral villain, the more it triggers identity protection in anyone outside the messengers’ political tribe. A communication strategy designed to engage people ends up with the opposite.
The evidence from energy transitions, infrastructure redesign, and collective action governance suggests that tapping emotions is rarely enough. Systems move first, and then people, now embedded in changed systems, change too. The ozone layer did not recover because consumers were morally convicted of their CFC use. It recovered because international regulatory redesign removed the choice from the system entirely. Marshall and Stoknes are solving for engagement, which is fair enough, but overshoot requires redesign. These are different problems, and they need different diagnoses.
And yet, we know them, they are with us because of biology and physics.
The ecological overshoot of 8 billion people on a finite planet is not best explained as moral collapse but as an emergent outcome of evolutionary imperatives to expand and reproduce, thermodynamic constraints governing energy and entropy, and a one-time fossil fuel energy pulse that temporarily lifted natural limits on population and consumption.
Scientists calculate the collective human footprint on the planet by totalling the surface area of land and sea required to provide the food, timber, and fibre resources we consume and to sequester the CO2 we emit. This is then weighed against the planet’s biocapacity, which is the Earth’s actual supply of productive ecosystems.
We are in overshoot. Human demand for biological services exceeds the environment’s ability to regenerate them within a year. Demand is met by depleting the natural capital.
Humanity currently uses resources at a rate equivalent to roughly 1.7 Earths, according to Global Footprint Network estimates that use these evidence techniques, and dumps the inevitable waste. Atmospheric CO₂ concentrations have risen from about 280 ppm in pre-industrial times to over 420 ppm in 2025. Vertebrate wildlife populations have declined by nearly 70% on average since 1970, according to WWF’s Living Planet Index. Wild mammals make up just 4% of the mammal biomass and half of that comes from the marine species. These are evidenced consequences of scale, energy throughput, and biological behaviour. Overshoot is a consequence of 8 billion people acting exactly as expected.
Across species, populations expand when energy and resources allow it. This is how ecology works for everything from bacteria in a nutrient-rich petri dish to deer introduced into predator-free environments. Numbers increase until constrained by resource limits or feedbacks. Humans are no exception. Over the past two centuries, global population rose from roughly 1 billion in 1800 to over 8 billion today thanks to rising per person energy use and agricultural productivity. This demographic surge was not triggered by a sudden decline in virtue worthy of blame, but by improved survival rates enabled by sanitation, medicine, and, critically, fossil-fuel-powered food systems.
We could blame some outgroup for this expansion and overshoot but, as Mr Spock would say, that would be illogical.
Population growth is a consequence of innate biology, where more making is the imperative. It also follows the laws of thermodynamics.
All complex systems require energy flows to maintain structure, otherwise entropy increases. And in a closed system, entropy (disorder) always increases. Industrial civilisation is a dissipative structure that follows this Second Law of Thermodynamics and can only be sustained by high-quality energy inputs. In 1800, global primary energy consumption was modest and largely biomass-based. Today it exceeds 600 exajoules per year, with fossil fuels still supplying around 80% of that total. This energy enables fertiliser production through the Haber–Bosch process, global transportation networks, mechanised agriculture, steel, cement, and digital infrastructure. Each transformation increases entropy, neatly following the second law, making the growth of cities, trade, and material wealth physically inseparable from accelerating energy dissipation. Overshoot, that in 2025 occurred on July 24, is a consequence.
Here’s the thing. None of these dynamics require a theory of moral failure.
So let’s return, for a moment, to shame.
The mind deflects fault onto others to avoid the searing heat of the feeling that I am not merely someone who did something wrong, but someone who is wrong. The distinction between guilt and shame is the distinction between a correctable error and a permanent verdict on identity. I made a mistake, I am guilty and I can make it right. Shame tells me that I am the mistake, and there is nothing I can do about it. Blame is a handy escape route from shame because, after all, it was your fault.
Ecological overshoot produces a version of this dynamic at civilisational scale. When a person or a culture absorbs what industrial humanity has done to the biosphere it is genuinely confronting, and the psychological options are limited. One is denial. The numbers are wrong, the scientists are mistaken, it is not really that bad. Another is grief, being homesick at home, which is honest but difficult to sustain at the scale required. A third, and the most common, is the diffuse, nauseating sense that to be human is to be the problem, that modernity is a moral catastrophe with no redemption, that we are, as a species, fundamentally and perhaps irredeemably wrong.
Civilisational shame drives the blame reflex just as personal shame does. If we are the problem, the mind reaches instinctively for a subset of ‘we’ that can bear the full weight of the verdict. The corporations, colonialists, capitalists, consumers, politicians or whoever can be identified as the real humans responsible, so that the rest of us, and perhaps humanity itself, can be partly acquitted. Blame becomes not just emotional stabilisation but species-level self-preservation. We are not wrong. They are.
This is obtuse logic, but the brain is powerful and can convince us of almost anything.
The more precise and objective thermodynamic lens offers a different psychological escape route from shame, one that does not require a victim. If the disorder of modernity is the predictable output of evolutionary biology meeting a finite burst of dense energy, then the verdict is not that humanity is morally defective. Humanity did what any energy-using, complexity-building biological system does when handed an extraordinary surplus. It grew.
That is not a comfortable frame, but it is correctable in a way that a moral defect is not. A thermodynamic diagnosis at least gives the option of redesign. A shame-driven verdict points toward punishment, which in the absence of any satisfying target circles back eventually to the self, or, until we find the courage, to nefarious actors in expensive suits.
Eight billion people living within energy-intensive systems on a finite biosphere create pressures that emerge from physics and biology before ethics enters the conversation. It is tempting, perhaps irresistible, to frame overshoot as a fault, a moral collapse that can be blamed on someone or some institution. Only this would misdiagnose what is, at root, a convergence of evolutionary imperatives, thermodynamic law, and a historically anomalous energy subsidy.
That is why we cannot help it.
So we can summarise all this as a premise.
Blame functions primarily as psychological stabilisation to preserve moral identity and perceived control, but it reinforces tribal division, defensive reasoning, and zero-sum politics, thereby obstructing the systems thinking and cross-institutional cooperation required to redesign complex socio-ecological systems.
Blame is emotionally stabilising, which means we like it.
Blame will offer moral clarity and emotional relief. For the individual, it’s great, but at scale it fragments coalitions, discourages institutional learning, and entrenches adversarial politics.
Haidt’s work in The Righteous Mind is already in this essay. His moral foundations research concludes that human beings are tribal and moralistic and that this tribalism is the evolutionary substrate on which collective action is built. Shared moral conviction, a common enemy, a sense that the group’s identity is under threat are the psychological mechanisms through which large groups of otherwise self-interested individuals have historically coordinated to do costly things together.
And we have coordinated to great success, at least in growth terms. Large cooperative groups work without relying on kinship bonds, but at the same time makes it harder to consider other frameworks for moral truth or ways to run a society. Blame can make groups sticky.
This is a serious challenge. If coordination requires a villain, and systems thinking dissolves the villain, have we improved the diagnosis while removing the motivation to act?
The answer depends on what kind of action we need. Moral framing is highly effective at triggering short-duration, high-intensity responses exemplified by protests, elections, boycotts, and campaigns. It mobilises people who are already sympathetic and deepens their commitment. What it does poorly is sustain the low-intensity, long-duration, technically complex institutional cooperation that infrastructure redesign actually requires. Passing a carbon pricing scheme, redesigning building codes, reforming agricultural subsidies, renegotiating grid architecture will not be accomplished by moral arousal. They need the grinding, multi-year, multi-stakeholder work of institutional redesign, in rooms that include people who disagree politically.
Haidt’s prescription of tribalism is calibrated for winning elections, defending territory, or sustaining religious communities. It is a prescription developed for a world in which the challenge is motivating an in-group to act against an out-group. Overshoot is not that kind of problem.
There is no out-group to defeat.
The system that needs redesigning includes everyone, runs on everyone’s energy consumption, and requires everyone’s institutions to change simultaneously. For that task, the blame game keeps producing out-groups when what is needed is coalitions.
Haidt is right about what motivates tribal mammals. There is no reason to dispute neuroscience. But tribal motivation is a poor tool for a systemic problem, and I wonder whether professional communicators who have built their entire strategy around that tool have considered what it might be producing at scale.
And there is another reason blame is a problem.
Human cognitive architecture evolved to assign responsibility within small tribal groups, favouring clear agents and moral narratives; this creates systematic blind spots when confronting large-scale, distributed systems in which causation is diffuse, delayed, and emergent.
For most of our evolutionary history, humans lived in small bands, rarely exceeding 100–150 individuals. In the brutal reality of foraging for food every day, cooperation, reputation tracking, and punishment of defectors were essential to survival. Identifying who failed to share food, who violated norms, or who posed a threat had immediate adaptive value. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s work on neocortex size and group limits suggests that human cognitive capacity evolved to manage stable social networks at roughly this scale.
Our brains were wired for these small, relatively intimate groups, where cause and effect had a face. If someone shirked, hoarded, or harmed, you saw it. The consequence was immediate and personal. Agency was not an abstract concept of some other thing, it was the person across the fire from you or leading the singing in the next fire along. So we became exquisitely sensitive to who did what, and who was to blame.
Cognitive science confirms this bias toward agency; a somebody did it response. Humans display what researchers call the hyperactive agency detection device (HADD), a tendency to infer intentional actors behind ambiguous events. This bias helped ancestral humans avoid predators or social betrayal but also predisposes modern populations to see deliberate intent in complex outcomes.
Similarly, the fundamental attribution error, well established in social psychology, leads individuals to overemphasise personal traits and underemphasise situational or structural factors when explaining behaviour. When scaled to planetary crises, this bias favours stories about greedy executives or narcissistic politicians over explanations involving feedback loops, infrastructure design, or energy dependence.
Time blindness compounds the problem. What researchers call hyperbolic discounting shows that humans systematically undervalue future risks relative to immediate rewards. Climate change, soil degradation, and biodiversity collapse unfold over decades, often with nonlinear tipping points and lagged consequences. Our cognitive architecture struggles with slow-moving, probabilistic threats like these. Daniel Kahneman’s distinction between fast, intuitive thinking and slower analytical reasoning rationalises the gap. Our intuitive cognition seeks clear cause-and-effect narratives, while systemic environmental problems require statistical and abstract reasoning that feels cognitively effortful and emotionally unsatisfying.
The challenge to our evolved thinking abilities is that ecological and economic systems run on distributed causation. No single individual causes atmospheric CO₂ accumulation. It is the cumulative result of billions of energy-consuming actions, most of them inside industrial systems that were built to make those actions normal. Add feedback loops, path dependence, and emergent properties, and the trail is lost altogether. You cannot draw a straight line from one actor to the outcome.
But our moral intuition keeps asking for a culprit with a name. Neuroscience and behavioural research on moral outrage show that attributing harm to identifiable agents activates reward pathways in the brain, creating a reinforcing emotional response. Blame feels clarifying and energising. This is why public debates so often slide into personalised blame instead of structural diagnosis. Messengers beware.
The alternative is to distribute responsibility thinly across populations and generations. This is a problem too as it generates cognitive overload and emotional ambiguity. The mind prefers a villain. How many drama shows on television have you quietly been rooting for the villain?
We have ourselves a mismatch. A brain that is comfortable with personalisation, moral simplification, and resistance to structural explanations, is great in a tribe on the savanna but not well suited to complex, long-duration environmental crises. Recognising this does not excuse harmful behaviour, nor does it mean there are no villains engaged in large-scale impacts. They exist. But being ready to blame explains why public discourse so often ignores the big picture.
When environmental breakdown is treated as a systems failure rather than a morality tale, the question shifts from whom to blame to what to fix.
Urban transport studies by Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy demonstrate that residents in dense, transit-oriented cities produce 60–80% lower transport emissions than those in car-dependent suburbs because the built environment makes low-carbon choices easier and often automatic.
Similarly, the rapid decline in coal use in the United Kingdom over the past decade was driven less by moral awakening than by structural shifts in carbon pricing, renewable energy cost reductions, regulatory reform, and grid redesign. Once the system made cleaner electricity economically viable and operationally reliable, emissions fell sharply. The International Energy Agency has repeatedly shown that efficiency standards and infrastructure investment deliver greater and more consistent emission reductions than voluntary behavioural appeals.
The recovery of the ozone layer following the Montreal Protocol was achieved not by vilifying consumers of aerosol sprays, but by redesigning industrial chemistry, phasing out chlorofluorocarbons, and supporting technological substitution.
Research in behavioural economics shows that defaults, pricing signals, and social norms embedded in institutions guide behaviour far more effectively than moral exhortation alone. Countries that implemented automatic enrolment in renewable electricity tariffs or retirement savings saw dramatic participation increases without requiring individuals to undergo moral transformation or blame anyone.
The lesson is that when we align systems with desired outcomes, large-scale change becomes feasible. Leverage lies in rules, feedbacks, and information flows rather than in moral condemnation.
When the system changes, outcomes follow.
When you encounter an environmental controversy that has been organised around the search for a guilty party, it helps to run three questions in sequence.
What evolutionary or biological mechanism is operating here?
Human beings expand consumption when surplus energy is available, resist loss more intensely than they pursue equivalent gain, discount future risk against present reward, and conform to the behaviour of their immediate social group. These are not character flaws. They are deeply conserved traits that were adaptive across almost the entire span of human existence. If a behaviour pattern is near-universal across cultures and income levels, the explanation almost certainly lies at this level. Car dependency is not primarily explained by laziness. It is explained by the fact that humans are predisposed to take the path of least resistance when a system has been designed to make driving the easiest option. Identifying the mechanism tells you where the intervention needs to land.
What thermodynamic or physical constraint is being violated, and by how much?
Overshoot is a quantifiable condition. As noted already, the Global Footprint Network calculated the date humanity consumed more from nature than the planet can regenerate in a twelve-month period was 24 July in 2025. Individual sectors have analogous measures, from the carbon intensity of energy supply and the nutrient loading of agricultural runoff, to the material throughput per unit of economic output. These numbers tell you the size of the gap between what the system is doing and what the biosphere can absorb. They also tell you whether the gap is embedded in infrastructure with 30- or 50-year lifespans or behavioural, where attitude change might actually reach it. In the UK coal case, grid architecture locked in fossil generation, regardless of what individuals chose. No amount of consumer virtue could close it. Regulatory and investment redesign could, and did.
What infrastructure or incentive redesign could align human behaviour with physical limits, without requiring moral transformation as a precondition?
This is where the leverage actually lives, and it is the question that blame-framed debate consistently fails to reach. Newman and Kenworthy’s research on urban transport showed that dense, transit-oriented cities produce dramatically lower emissions not because their residents are more virtuous but because the system makes low-carbon choices the default. The Montreal Protocol worked because it restructured the industrial chemistry of refrigeration and aerosols, making CFC-free alternatives commercially viable and legally mandatory. No consumer had to change their values. The system changed, and behaviour followed.
Naturally, there is a crucial caveat.
Running these three questions does not dissolve individual responsibility. There are still actors who make choices, and some of those choices are better or worse than others. But the question stops being who deserves blame for this? and becomes what mechanism is driving this, how large is the physical constraint, and what system change would move the needle regardless of moral consensus?
That is a question a sustainability consultant can take into a client meeting. It is a question a retired engineer can raise in a community planning session. It is the question that has actually produced results in the cases where results have occurred.
This essay has danced around a quiet paradox. The same mechanism that protects an individual ego from fracture can, at scale, fracture a society.
The blame reflex may be an evolutionary inheritance, but many sociologists and psychologists argue its frequency and intensity have spiked in the modern era. We have not necessarily become worse people. We have constructed an environment that acts as a super-stimulus for blame.
A generation ago, you might have been a Labour voter and also a member of the local footy club, a parishioner, or a neighbourhood watch member, groups that included people with entirely different political views. You had more than one tribe.
Those overlapping affiliations created friction. They made it harder to reduce someone to a single disagreement. The modern shift is identity sorting that has collapsed political, religious, and cultural identities into two or three mega-identities. When you blame the other side now, you are taking on what feels like the antithesis of everything you value. Gone are the days of banter and healthy argument. Blame stops being transactional and starts feeling existential.
And then we added a virtual world to steal our time and change our interactions. Social media platforms are engineered to prioritise high-arousal emotions because those emotions drive engagement. Blame and outrage sit at the top of that scale. On the socials, a nuanced take on a complex problem gets crickets. A post that names a villain and assigns responsibility spikes, and the reward loop kicks in. Likes and shares from your tribe deliver a dopamine hit. The system gamifies blame, and we adapt to the game.
Certainly, the world is objectively more complex than it was 100 years ago. Global supply chains, infectious diseases, economic shifts are large, convoluted systems that are difficult to map, let alone explain. The human brain prefers clarity, but the gap between how complex problems are and how simple we want the explanation to be, has widened beyond our ability to cope. Blame closes that gap by shrinking a thousand systemic variables into a single target. It was their fault.
But the thing is, it’s nobody’s fault.
For 96 percent of recorded human history and 99.93% of our evolutionary past, we were constrained by endogenous energy. The calories we could consume gathered through the muscle power of humans and animals. Social structures, moral codes, and population levels moved at the pace of the sun and the seasons. Then came the spike. Roughly 200 years ago, we accessed a vast inheritance of exogenous energy in coal, oil, and gas. One barrel of oil delivered the work equivalent of about 12.5 thousand hours of human labour. This was a phase change. Almost overnight, we became a species that uses dense energy to push hard against natural limits.
And energy increases complexity.
More energy leads to more specialised roles, which leads to more bureaucracy, which leads to more intricate global systems. As long as energy remained cheap and expanding, growth was not simply a choice. Biological systems follow what is called the Maximum Power Principle. If surplus energy is available, organisms will use it to expand their reach. Humans are not exempt from that pattern.
From the vantage point of the energy pulse, fault-finding makes little sense. Blaming the colonialists, the capitalists or the corporations resembles blaming a plant for growing toward light. Once high-density energy was used to reduce infant mortality and increase food production, path dependency set in. Billions of people were as inevitable as the global metabolism. No single actor directs the aggregate energy burn. It is a self-organising process constrained by thermodynamics.
The appeal of this lens is that it strips away some of the moral charge. If the disorder of modernity is thermodynamically conditioned, guilt becomes less explanatory. Blame becomes less useful.
The core reality remains stark.
We are a species that struck a geological jackpot and are now living through the high-speed, high-friction, energy dissipating consequences of spending that jackpot all at once. Understanding that it is nobody’s fault in the causal sense is crucial to what comes next.
Joe’s golf game will not improve by blaming Baz, the golf pro, for fat grips. Baz probably knows this. So does Joe. Blaming the fat grips and the advice are just easier to say out loud, making Joe feel so much better.
But you cannot redesign a system you are too ashamed to examine honestly.
Primary Sources
Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution, 22(6), 469–493.
Feinberg, M., & Willer, R. (2011). Apocalypse soon? Dire messages reduce belief in global warming by threatening belief in a just world. Psychological Science, 22(1), 34–43.
Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind. Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Vintage Books.
Newman, P., & Kenworthy, J. (1999). Sustainability and cities. Overcoming automobile dependence. Island Press.
Smil, V. (2017). Energy and civilization. A history. MIT Press.
Stoknes, P. E. (2015). What we think about when we try not to think about global warming. Toward a new psychology of climate action. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Nice, if long!
As you say, humans are no exception to the maximum power principle. It's why no amount of hoping for behavioural change will change behaviour.
You mentioned areas where behavioural change became the easiest option but I don't see it as even behavioural change. Rather, it was that the underlying infrastructure changes made normal behaviour less impactful. Nobody had to do anything differently because the refrigerant changed. No-one had to do anything differently because the electricity grid was redesigned.
Climate change seems to have become the main perceived danger and so most "solutions" seem to be focused on reducing emissions. We never see that reducing emissions is not a solution (since ALL human caused emissions need to be removed) and would not address the other aspects of environmental degradation. And removing all emissions means removing that energy giving us 12.5 thousands hours of labour for every barrel of oil equivalent. It means ending modernity, which absolutely no-one really wants to do, even though it will happen.
We're all to blame but nobody is to blame (because we're simply acting like species, like living organisms).
What approach we should take to our predicament is unclear. Humans can't live in modernity for ever but almost no humans know how to live without it. It is a huge predicament. Perhaps the only sensible course of action is to live one's life as though modernity will never end and then try to deal with the situation when it does. It might not happen for several generations but it doesn't look like it's too far away.