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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

I sometimes get academic flack for my economics work having more math and physics than is palatable. I call it rigor, but here's a piece just out in the Mint Magazine about how climate change drives inflation with no equations! www.themintmagazine.com/economic-eng...

themintmagazine.com

Economic engine erring – The Mint Magazine

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

A terrific post on recent work with Matheus Grasselli on the thermodynamic forces driving economic inflation, particularly -- but not exclusively -- within the context of damages from climate change "The Thermodynamic Endgame of Industrial Civilization" kasperbenjamin.substack.com/p/the-thermo...

kasperbenjamin.substack.com

The Thermodynamic Endgame of Industrial Civilization

The physics of inflation, the logic of transition, and the policies that might save us

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

The old of civilization is always falling apart even as it newly grows. Additional decay forced by climate change need only grow by 0.1%/year to lead to civilization collapse by 2070, sooner for higher rates. We will collapse slowly then all at once. egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/20...

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

A really odd thing about existing Integrated Assessment Model descriptions of climate damages is that they imply (as we describe) absurdly low rates of economic inflation even for catastrophic warming egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/20...

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

Not the first time I've posted this, but I always find it quite fascinating how well it continues to hold. For over *two thousand years*, atmospheric CO2 perturbations have scaled with the world GDP. Aren't the implications for climate change mitigation pretty simple...?

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

In 2017 at a small meeting in Switzerland on energy and the economy, experts scolded me that the economy would collapse from resource depletion and debt, certainly by 2025. I argued inertia would keep it growing longer (not forever). Here we are. Physics actually works! Always.

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

So it turns out snowflake settling is full of surprises. Not just size, not just shape, not just density, not just turbulence, but perhaps more than anything it is the mean wind horizontal winds speeds that controls how fast snowflakes fall essopenarchive.org/doi/full/10....

essopenarchive.org

Settling and rotation of frozen hydrometeors in turbulent air

Numerical model predictions of precipitation rates rely heavily on representations of how fast hydrometeors fall, assuming settling is determined only by the opposing force balance of gravity and drag...

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Reposted by Tim Garrett

Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 03/01/2025

Origami Black Hole xkcd.com/3033

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

I developed an economic theory that underscores how energy and matter are the twin cornerstones of economic activity and growth, how mitigating climate change will require a fundamental restructuring of society. Here's a nice video produced about it www.youtube.com/watch?v=soXW...

youtube.com

FAQ on the Garrett theory of economic growth

YouTube video by Economic Growth and Collapse

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

Tim Garrett @nephologue Human history is the tension between boundless exponential expansion and the harsh reality of resource depletion and pollution. Can innovation forever keep us afloat, or will nature hasten our demise? A new video: t.co/B35B4YBRSl

youtube.com

YouTube

Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

New video. Our economic models are unscientific: their assumptions cannot potentially be disproved. Starting ground-up from thermodynamic principles, we can build new economic models that make the testable predictions we need to guide our economic future www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFh0...

youtube.com

The physical origins of economic Wealth

YouTube video by Economic Growth and Collapse

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

We must face the limits to our economic growth. Civilization thrives on high availability of energy and material resources, but at the cost of pollution and depletion. Traditional economics trivializes these constraints and risks hastening our collapse www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip5l...

youtube.com

The physical limits to economic growth

YouTube video by Economic Growth and Collapse

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

Civilization grows by efficiently using an energy surplus to transform the earth's crust into the stuff of us. However, growth has limits. Resource depletion and internal decay will tip us towards collapse. A new video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOdo...

youtube.com

Humanity’s economic conundrum

YouTube video by Economic Growth and Collapse

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

I'll be posting a series of videos on economic growth and collapse from this @YouTube channel spurred by Michael Fardos www.youtube.com/channel/UCA6...

youtube.com

Economic Growth and Collapse

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

Check out this new @YouTube channel about economic growth and decline. Civilizations rise exponentially, only to become fragile as resources deplete and decay sets in. The path of expansion, discovery, and collapse seems defining. But can innovation sustain us? www.youtube.com/channel/UCA6...

youtube.com

Economic Growth and Collapse

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Really productive session with Steve Keen and Matheus Grasselli last week at McMaster University. We came up with a new simple formulation to predict when GDP growth will stall due to climate damages.

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Off to Toronto Tuesday to reignite a very fruitful past collaboration with Profs Steve Keen and Matheus Grasselli. Our goal is to try to predict when climate change tips the GDP towards collapse and to what degree it will show up as an inflationary pressure.

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Reposted by Tim Garrett

Rachel Donald @racheldonald.bsky.social · 23/05/2024

What's the relationship between our energy consumption, our material footprint and our economies? I spoke with the funnest physicist I know @nephologue.bsky.social to find out. Listen now: www.planetcritical.com/p/the-thermo...

planetcritical.com

The Thermodynamics of Degrowth | Tim Garrett

Collapse and Recovery

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Reposted by Tim Garrett

Rachel Donald @racheldonald.bsky.social · 28/05/2024

"Humanity uses its energy surplus to transform materials from one thing to another – even if we did find a way to create a renewable supply of energy, we would still run up against hard limits to material transformation: the planet is finite." www.planetcritical.com/p/the-holy-t...

planetcritical.com

The Holy Trinity

Getting a grip on energy, materials and civilisation

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Reposted by Tim Garrett

Andrew Dessler @andrewdessler.com · 05/05/2024

Your occasional reminder that one of the longest standing predictions of climate science, which has subsequently been verified by observations, is that rainfall events will become more intense. www.nytimes.com/2024/05/05/u...

nytimes.com

More Flooding Expected in Houston as Rain Drenches Texas

Rivers in Southeast Texas could be swollen for days or weeks, forecasters said, as multiple rounds of heavy rainfall continued on Sunday.

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 20/11/2023

What happened to Twitter? Overall intellectual level of responses to tweets there kind of plummeted it seems like all that place has left is climate denying bots

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 14/11/2023

Optimism... for one side of the coin without addressing the other that fossil fuels remain useful and available. Innovating a nuclear or solar powered heat pump won't change fossil utilitiy unless we *also* stop innovation of other fossil uses www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 12/11/2023

Burning clean in the Wasatch Back

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 04/11/2023

Having just attended a workshop with a gaggle of prestigious macroeconomists, I worry that a system of pursuing and maintaining academic prestige makes it harder to solve hard problems, in this case addressing the existential risk that climate change will cause mass migration and economic collapse

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 23/10/2023

Headed to this workshop next week: "to explore complex climate dynamics—including nonlinear, compounding, and cascading risks—and how these dynamics will affect and may propagate in the macroeconomy" www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/the... Expect it to be interesting

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 21/10/2023

Having built an off-grid (solar) power plant for a home, with its countless headaches, I appreciate much more now the miracle of the nearly infallible link from a distant power plant to the light switch. Of course, coal has it's issues, but still, power centralization is enormously impressive

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 17/10/2023

From time to time I get told that we cannot model human systems as physical systems. This is ideology not science esd.copernicus.org/articles/6/6...

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Tim Garrett @nephologue.bsky.social · 15/10/2023

If we all stopped flying it would not necessarily affect CO2 emissions because the fossil fuels would remain available and useful, and now less competitive to access. Such statements need to evaluate whether the case of fewer flyers simply lets others get bigger trucks

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