Johnstone on Capitalism... and avoiding extinction

The Unspoken Premise Of Modern Capitalism Is That The World Will Be Saved By Greedy Tech Oligarchs. Caitlin Johnstone. Dec. 29, 2020.

 

Psychopathic neocon Nikki Haley is greasing the wheels for her 2024 presidential campaign by screaming that America has been taken over by socialism.

“2020 was the year socialism went mainstream,” Haley tweeted today. “The dangerous ideology, which has failed everywhere it has been tried and ruined countless lives, is on its way to becoming the default economic policy of the Democratic Party. This terrifying trend threatens the future of every American.”

Ah yes, America. The country where Republicans spend all day screaming that socialism is happening and Democrats spend all day making sure it never does.

Meanwhile, outside of Nikki Haley’s magical fantasy world where Joe Biden is ushering in a Marxist world order and Bernie Sanders is personally guillotining billionaires in Central Park, Americans are being denied financial support and healthcare even as millions are thrown out of work during the pandemic.

In reality, the world is still very much locked into zealous worship of the great god known as capitalism. And it is choking the world to death.

We live on a finite planet of finite resources with a finite ecosystem that has a finite capacity to absorb punishment without becoming uninhabitable. Science tells us we are fast approaching the breaking point at a debatable rate of acceleration. Depending on what scientists you believe we could get there in several decades, or it could be a whole lot sooner.

Capitalism, the predominant driving force of human behavior in our world right now, offers exactly two potential solutions to this dilemma. The first is to pretend the dilemma doesn’t exist, which is why a Venn diagram of climate denialism and support for capitalism is always going to be a near-perfect circle. The second is the entirely faith-based hope that some kind of sustainable technological innovation is going to save the day before our behavior drives us off the cliff of extinction.

Which means the only answer capitalism has for the current plight of our species is the blind-faith belief that the world is about to be saved, any minute now, by a handful of union-busting tech billionaires who choose every single day not to use their vast fortunes to end world hunger. That is the unspoken premise in the argument for the continuation of capitalism.

Since ideological echo chambers tend to develop their own dialects and definitions which can make cross-ideological conversation damn near impossible, I should clarify that what I mean by capitalism is the current system dominating our world today wherein human behavior is driven as a whole by the pursuit of capital. The current system of profit-seeking and competition as the primary determining factor of what humans are doing on this planet.

Profit-chasing as the driving factor in human behavior is what got us here. As long as it remains profitable to destroy the environment and human behavior is driven by profit, then humans will continue destroying the environment. Inevitably. This will have to happen.

So for purposes of this conversation it’s actually irrelevant whether capitalism enthusiasts believe the current system is “real capitalism” or not, whether you believe the markets are “free” or not, or whether or not you prefer Austrian over Keynesian models of economic theory. Since we’re talking about any system where profit-chasing and competition drives human behavior at mass scale, we are necessarily talking about whatever pet definition of capitalism you happen to prefer.

So there’s no need to play pedantic word games about this.

So, again, the only argument for our species continuing along its current trajectory is the entirely faith-based belief that some greedy anti-union plutocrat like Elon Musk is going to promote new technologies which make it unprofitable for any humans to destroy the environment, and do so quickly enough to evert ecological disaster. Which is slightly dumber than believing the world has been saved by the election of Joe Biden.

The plutocratic class are not good custodians of our world. They are not good people. They are not wise. They are not even particularly intelligent. They’re just a very profitable sort of clever, and have a willingness to crush anyone who gets in their way.

The plutocratic class has been buying up control over our political systems to ensure maximum profit, buying up news media outlets to propagandize the masses into supporting the status quo they’ve built their kingdoms on, and forming alliances with sociopathic government agencies which murder people around the world to ensure continual US unipolar hegemony. These are the people we’ve placed in charge of the innovation and distribution of emerging technologies, and we’re meant to believe that they will save the world?

They will not. They will keep chasing power and profit until we drive ourselves off the cliff of extinction. It’s all they know how to do.

We’re never going to compete and consume our way out of the existential crisis we’ve competed and consumed our way into. Capitalism will never make it more profitable to leave a tree standing than to cut it down, to leave fuel sources in the ground rather than dig them up. Money has no wisdom, no matter how inflation-proof and gold-backed you might want to make it. Markets cannot navigate us through this crisis, no matter how “free” you might try to make them. Capitalism is the problem. Not the wrong kind of capitalism. Just capitalism.

The only way humanity survives the looming existential threats of ecological collapse and nuclear war it now faces is if it radically transforms from a competition-based model to a collaboration-based model. One where we collaborate with each other and with our ecosystem to clear the massive hurdles that are rapidly approaching instead of stepping on each other’s heads in a mad scramble to stay afloat and destroying our ecosystemic life support system for profit.

Even if you want to make the extremely debatable claim that socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried, an earnest reckoning with our situation will force you to admit that capitalism has failed too. Our system of insatiable profit-seeking to the detriment of our world has led us to the brink of extinction, which is as spectacular a failure as any system could possibly manage. How much of a failure is a system that gets everyone killed? All of it. All the fail.

So it’s kind of a nonsensical position to argue that a movement away from competition and profit-seeking is untenable because it’s never been done before, because our current disastrous situation is the direct result of everything we have already tried. Everything we’ve done led us to this point. If we are to survive as a species, we’re necessarily going to have to do something that is entirely unprecedented. We’re going to have to transcend our old patterning and do something completely new.

A world where human behavior is driven by collaboration in the interests of humanity and our ecosystem instead of competition and profit seeking would indeed be wildly unprecedented. Our current crisis is itself also wildly unprecedented. This is evolve-or-die time.

We are living in unprecedented times, and unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures. We need to stop clinging to our old failed ways of doing things and find the courage to step into an entirely new way of being.

Topic: QAnon

QAnon and the Fragility of Truth. Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs. Dec. 30, 2020.

My general approach to things labeled “conspiracy theories” is not to wave them away as “crazy.” I do not want beliefs considered outlandish to be dismissed without consideration, because I hold beliefs that some people consider outlandish, and I do not want to be treated as a kook myself. I want people to evaluate my actual arguments and determine for themselves whether what I am saying is reasonable. I know that one of my intellectual heroes, Noam Chomsky, is often treated as a “crank” and “conspiracy theorist.” I don’t see him that way, because I have spent a lot of time reading his work carefully and examining his arguments. But if I had listened to what people said about what he said, instead of diving into the original material, I would never have given him a fair hearing.

Does that mean I want to give QAnon a fair hearing? Yes. Yes it does. Because, and you may laugh, what if the QAnon theory is true? The first QAnon book I opened, QAnon: An Invitation to the Great Awakening,** which calls itself a “field guide to an important chunk of reality that’s been carefully hidden and wrongly discredited by the media,” begins by asking:

Have you ever wondered why we go to war or why you never seem to be able to get out of debt? Why there is poverty, division, and crime? What if I told you there was a reason for it all? What if I told you it was done on purpose? What if I told you that those corrupting the world, poisoning our food and igniting conflict were themselves about to be permanently eradicated from the earth? You might think that is an idealistic fantasy. Well, let me tell you a story. 

Your first reaction to this might be: oh, boy. Here comes a conspiracy theory. But I actually try to keep myself from rolling my eyes. If someone comes to me with this kind of story, I want to give them a chance to lay out their case, because I don’t know what their story is and I don’t know everything about the world, and on the off chance that they’re right and I’m wrong, I kind of want to find out about the reasons for war and poverty and the coming eradication of those causing it! 

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I do not think people who believe in QAnon are stupid. In fact, I think it’s a huge mistake to assume that. I do think that anyone who believes in this theory hasn’t thought very critically about the kinds of cognitive biases we are subject to, and the ways that we can be manipulated into thinking we are discovering truth when we are actually drifting further and further away from it. The Washington Post’s ex-QAnoner was a perfectly normal and intelligent guy who was frightened when he realized how far he’d gone toward believing something he now realized to be obviously untrue. He still didn’t quite understand how it had happened. It is important to accept that ordinary people, even well-educated and otherwise-sensible ones, can end up believing totally bonkers falsehoods.

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I still believe in the power of evidence and reason, even though I have long thought that simply “fact checking” people to death is an ineffective way to change their minds. But “evidence” and “reason” are not just magic words you can say. Reasoning is something you do, evidence is something you either have or don’t have. Like many others on the right, the QAnon propagandists use the rhetoric of evidence without the reality of it. 

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Everyone needs to learn to be a true skeptic. Many QAnon people are actually trying to be skeptics. They question what the media tells them. If someone else comes along with a theory that sounds crazy but offers a coherent story and has a bunch of facts they don’t know how to explain away, they listen. The problem is that they need to think harder and do some serious scrutiny of the kinds of things they have started to find persuasive. 

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Part of the problem is that very little of our knowledge is based on examining evidence and weighing arguments to begin with. We often believe things because someone we trust to tell us the truth has told us a thing is true. And yes, that goes for liberals and leftists just as much as QAnon people. 

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It’s incredibly difficult to find the truth in this world, and everyone probably believes a number of things that aren’t the case. The very definition of truth, and the possibility of finding it out absolutely, are highly contested. We do the best we can and sometimes we go down blind alleys. QAnon is a real serious blind alley. We can see why people end up going down it, though. It tells a powerful tale that offers people a motivation for avoiding critical questions they might otherwise ask.

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The whole Q theory cannot really last beyond Trump’s last day in office. I think many of these people are soon going to discover that they need a new theory once the Great Awakening doesn’t happen. 

The bigger problem here is that QAnon is “proof of concept” for greater mass delusions in the future. It shows how fragile the truth is and how easy it can be to get something utterly ridiculous to be taken very seriously by scarily large numbers of people. The tendencies that lead people to be sucked into these kinds of psychological black holes are still going to be present next year and the year after. I am reassured to know they are easy to combat intellectually. I am discomforted to know that this may not matter in the least. 

QAnon Is A Fake, Decoy Imitation Of A Healthy Revolutionary Impulse. Caitlin Johnstone. Aug. 20, 2020.

I write against QAnon periodically for the exact same reason I write against the plutocratic media: it’s an obvious propaganda construct designed to manufacture support for the status quo among people who otherwise would not support it. It presents itself as an exciting movement where the little guy is finally rising up and throwing off the chains of the tyrannical forces which have been exploiting and oppressing us, yet in reality all it’s doing is telling a discontented sector of the population to relax and “trust the plan” and put all their faith in the leader of the US government.

And that’s exactly what makes QAnon so uniquely toxic. It’s not just that it gets people believing false things which confuse and alienate them, it’s that it’s a fake, decoy imitation of what a healthy revolutionary impulse would look like. It sells people on important truths that they already intuitively know on some level, like the untrustworthiness of the mass media, that the official elected US government aren’t really the ones calling the shots, and that we need a great awakening. It takes those vital, truthful, healthy revolutionary impulses, then twists them around into support for the United States president and the agendas of the Republican Party.

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The fact that people need to be deceived by their healthy impulses in this way is a good sign; it means we’re generally good people with a generally healthy sense of which way to push. If we were intrinsically wicked and unwise their propaganda wouldn’t hook us by telling us to fight tyranny, defend children and tell the truth–it would hook us using our cowardice, our hatred, our greed, our sadism. People are basically good, and propagandists use that goodness to trick us.

But good will and good intentions aren’t enough, unfortunately. Even intelligence, by itself, isn’t enough to save us from being propagandized; some fairly intelligent people have fallen for propaganda operations like QAnon and Russiagate. If you want to have a clear perspective on what’s really going on in the world you’ve got to have an unwavering devotion to knowing what’s true that goes right down into your guts.

Most people don’t have this. Most people do not have truth as a foremost priority. They probably think they do, but they don’t. When it comes right down to it, most people are more invested in finding ways to defend their preexisting biases than in learning what’s objectively true. If they’ve got a special hatred for Democrats, the confirmation biases that will give them leave them susceptible to the QAnon psyop. If they’ve got a special hatred for Trump, they’re susceptible to believing he’s controlled by some kind of Russian government conspiracy. There are any number of other directions such biases can carry someone.

Only by a humble devotion to truth that is willing to sacrifice any worldview or ideology to the uncompromising fire of objective reality can skilfully navigate through a world that is saturated with disinformation and propaganda. Sincerely put truth first in all things while doing your best to find out what’s actually going on in our world, and eventually you’re guaranteed to free yourself from any perceptual distortion.

How You Can Be 100% Certain That QAnon Is Bullshit. Johnstone. May 26, 2019.

... If you’re one of those fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the QAnon phenomenon, in October of 2017 odd posts began appearing on the anonymous message board 4chan, which is wildly popular with trolls, incels and racists. Those posts ceased appearing on 4chan and moved to a related site, 8chan, where they continue appearing to this day. The poster purports to have insider knowledge of a secret, silent and invisible war that President Trump has been waging against the Deep State with the help of the US military and various “white hats” within the US government, and shares snippets about this war with 8chan users in extremely vague and garbled posts.

Here are three reasons you can be absolutely, 100 percent certain that it’s bullshit:

1. It always, always, always excuses Trump’s facilitation of evil deep state agendas.

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2. They always, always, always refuse to prove the validity of their position.

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A year ago I tweeted out that I was thinking of writing an article about QAnon and asked its adherents for their very best links/screenshots proving its legitimacy. Go ahead and have a read of the kinds of responses I got by clicking this hyperlink if you’re curious. No one came remotely close to providing anything like the evidence I’d asked for, with most responses falling along the lines of “You kind of have to just immerse yourself in it over an extended period of time and marinate in it until you believe,” which is the same sort of response you’ll get if you ask a religious proselytizer to prove the legitimacy of their religion. I shared the thread again yesterday and got the same response, with one QAnon promoter with a fairly large following telling me, “No amount of evidence can be seen by one choosing to stay blind.”

This is completely different from standard conspiracy theories. If you ask a 9/11 truther to prove the legitimacy of their position, they’ll instantly be able to produce clear and concise videos and articles for you, and if they’ve actually done their homework they’ll be able to regale you with information about physics, forensics, architecture, chemistry, and plot holes in the official narrative. If you ask someone who’s got theories about the JFK assassination you’ll get a comparable amount of lucidity. Ask a QAnon cultist for the same level of intellectual transparency and you’ll get a bunch of mealy-mouthed gibberish which will quickly turn into accusations that you are lazy for refusing to do your own research if you keep pressing.

This is because there is no actual, tangible factual basis for the belief system which has sprouted up around QAnon. It begins, just like any other religion, as a premise of faith, and then the adherents to that faith pool their intellectual resources into the task of finding reasons to legitimize that premise. They begin with the premise that Trump is a good and noble savior who is uprooting the source of all of America’s problems with strategic maneuvers which are so brilliant that they look like the exact opposite of what they are, then they let confirmation bias and other cognitive biases do the rest of the work for them.

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3. It’s made many bogus claims and inaccurate predictions.

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I don’t claim to know everything about this QAnon thing or who exactly is behind it, but these three points I just outlined in my opinion kill all doubt that it’s not what it purports to be. For anyone looking at them with intellectual honesty rather than the same way a creationist or cult member might look at something which challenges their faith, anyway.

It is not good that a vocal and enthusiastic part of Trump’s largely anti-interventionist, pro-WikiLeaks base has been propagandized into consistently stumping for longtime agendas of the CIA and the Pentagon. Someone’s benefiting from this, and it isn’t you.

Climate Links: December 2020

‘Collapse of civilisation is the most likely outcome’: top climate scientists. Voice of Action. Dec. 6, 2020.
The world’s most eminent climate scientists and biologists believe we’re headed for the collapse of civilisation, and it may already be too late to change course.

Australia’s top climate scientist says “we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse” of civilisation, which may now be inevitable because 9 of the 15 known global climate tipping points that regulate the state of the planet have been activated.

Australian National University emeritus professor Will Steffen told Voice of Action that there was already a chance we have triggered a “global tipping cascade” that would take us to a less habitable “Hothouse Earth” climate, regardless of whether we reduced emissions.

Steffen says it would take 30 years at best (more likely 40-60 years) to transition to net zero emissions, but when it comes to tipping points such as Arctic sea ice we could have already run out of time.

Evidence shows we will also lose control of the tipping points for the Amazon rainforest, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and the Greenland ice sheet in much less time than it’s going to take us to get to net zero emissions, Steffen says.

“Given the momentum in both the Earth and human systems, and the growing difference between the ‘reaction time’ needed to steer humanity towards a more sustainable future, and the ‘intervention time’ left to avert a range of catastrophes in both the physical climate system (e.g., melting of Arctic sea ice) and the biosphere (e.g., loss of the Great Barrier Reef), we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse,” said Steffen.

“That is, the intervention time we have left has, in many cases, shrunk to levels that are shorter than the time it would take to transition to a more sustainable system.

“The fact that many of the features of the Earth System that are being damaged or lost constitute ‘tipping points’ that could well link to form a ‘tipping cascade’ raises the ultimate question: Have we already lost control of the system? Is collapse now inevitable?”

This is not a unique view – leading Stanford University biologists, who were first to reveal that we are already experiencing the sixth mass extinction on Earth, released new research this week showing species extinctions are accelerating in an unprecedented manner, which may be a tipping point for the collapse of human civilisation.

Also in the past week research emerged showing the world’s major food baskets will experience more extreme droughts than previously forecast, with southern Australia among the worst hit globally.

Steffen used the metaphor of the Titanic in one of his recent talks to describe how we may cross tipping points faster than the time it would take us to react to get our impact on the climate under control.

“If the Titanic realises that it’s in trouble and it has about 5km that it needs to slow and steer the ship, but it’s only 3km away from the iceberg, it’s already doomed,” he said. 

‘This is an existential threat to civilization’

Steffen, along with some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists, laid out our predicament in the starkest possible terms in a piece for the journal Nature at the end of last year.

They found that 9 of the 15 known Earth tipping elements that regulate the state of the planet had been activated, and there was now scientific support for declaring a state of planetary emergency. These tipping points can trigger abrupt carbon release back into the atmosphere, such as the release of carbon dioxide and methane caused by the irreversible thawing of the Arctic permafrost.

“If damaging tipping cascades can occur and a global tipping point cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to civilization,” they wrote.

“No amount of economic cost–benefit analysis is going to help us. We need to change our approach to the climate problem.

“The evidence from tipping points alone suggests that we are in a state of planetary emergency: both the risk and urgency of the situation are acute.”

Steffen is also the lead author of the heavily cited 2018 paper, Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, where he found that “even if the Paris Accord target of a 1.5°C to 2°C rise in temperature is met, we cannot exclude the risk that a cascade of feedbacks could push the Earth System irreversibly onto a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway.”

Steffen is a global authority on the subject of tipping points, which are prone to sudden shifts if they get pushed hard enough by a changing climate, and could take the trajectory of the system out of human control. Further warming would become self-sustaining due to system feedbacks and their mutual interaction.

Steffen describes it like a row of dominos and his concern is we are already at the point of no return, knocking over the first couple of dominos which could lead to a cascade knocking over the whole row.

“Some of these we think are vulnerable in the temperature range we’re entering into now,” said Steffen.

“If we get those starting to tip we could get the whole row of dominos tipping and take us to a much hotter climate even if we get our emissions down.”

Even the notoriously conservative United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has found that already with the 1.1°C of warming we have had to date, there was a moderate risk of tipping some of these – and the risk increased as the temperatures increased.

Steffen believes we are committed to at least a 1.5°C temperature rise given the momentum in the economic and climate system, but we still have a shot at staying under 2°C with urgent action. 

+4°C world would support < 1 billion people

Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director emeritus and founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, believes if we go much above 2°C we will quickly get to 4°C anyway because of the tipping points and feedbacks, which would spell the end of human civilisation.

Johan Rockström, the head of one of Europe’s leading research institutes, warned in 2019 that in a 4°C-warmer world it would be “difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that … There will be a rich minority of people who survive with modern lifestyles, no doubt, but it will be a turbulent, conflict-ridden world”.

Schellnhuber, one of the world’s leading authorities on climate change, said that if we continue down the present path “there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation. The human species will survive somehow but we will destroy almost everything we have built up over the last two thousand years.”

Schellnhuber said in a recent interview that the IPCC report stating we could stay below 1.5°C of warming was “slightly dishonest” because it relies on immense negative emissions (pulling CO2 out of the air) which was not viable at global scale. He said 1.5°C was no longer achievable but it was still possible to stay under 2°C with massive changes to society. [mw: immediately... or yesterday / yesteryear]

If we don’t bend the emissions curve down substantially before 2030 then keeping temperatures under 2°C becomes unavoidable. The “carbon law” published in the journal Science in 2017 found that, to hold warming below 2°C, emissions would need to be cut in half between 2020 and 2030.

Steffen told Voice of Action that the three main challenges to humanity – climate change, the degradation of the biosphere and the growing inequalities between and among countries – were “just different facets of the same fundamental problem”.

This problem was the “neoliberal economic system” that spread across the world through globalisation, underpinning “high production high consumption lifestyles” and a “religion built not around eternal life but around eternal growth”.

“It is becoming abundantly clear that (i) this system is incompatible with a well-functioning Earth System at the planetary level; (ii) this system is eroding human- and societal-well being, even in the wealthiest countries, and (iii) collapse is the most likely outcome of the present trajectory of the current system, as prophetically modelled in 1972 in the Limits to Growth work,” Steffen told Voice of Action. 

Eternal growth is not possible

The Limits to Growth model released by the Club of Rome in 1972 looked at the interplay between food production, industry, population, non-renewable resources and pollution.

The basic findings were that you can’t grow the system indefinitely as you will cause environmental and resource issues that will ultimately cause the whole global system to collapse (ABC’s This Day Tonight program covered it here). At the time of the model’s release it accurately reproduced the historical data from 1900 to 1970.

A 2008 study by Graham Turner, then a senior CSIRO research scientist, used three decades of real-world historical data to conclude that the Limits to Growth model’s predictions were coming to pass: “30 years of historical data compare favourably with key features of a business-as-usual [BAU] scenario called the ‘standard run’ scenario, which results in collapse of the global system midway through the 21st century.”

Turner ran updated figures through the model again in 2012 for another peer-reviewed paper, and again in 2014 when he had joined the University of Melbourne’s Sustainable Society Institute.

“Data from the forty years or so since the LTG study was completed indicates that the world is closely tracking the BAU scenario,” Turner concluded in the 2014 paper.

“It is notable that there does not appear to be other economy-environment models that have demonstrated such comprehensive and long-term data agreement.”

Turner semi-retired in 2015 but runs a small organic market garden on a rural property in the NSW south coast’s Bega Valley.

He and his wife grow most of their own food and live off grid powered by a solar energy system. Turner said this saved him during last summer’s catastrophic bushfires as his power stayed online but most people in the area lost power for weeks.

Turner has continued tracking the data as best as possible since his last official report in 2014, and last year he helped a Harvard masters student update the data for their thesis.

Turner told Voice of Action that under his modelling the business as usual scenario “ends up resulting in a global collapse from about now through the next decade or so”.

It was difficult to predict a timeline but Turner said he believed “there’s an extremely strong case that we may be in the early stages of a collapse right at the moment”.

“Vested interests and corrupt politicians combined with a population happy to deny problems overwhelm those that are trying to promulgate truth and facts,” said Turner. 

‘By 2030 we’ll know what path we’ve taken’

Steffen told Voice of Action that it’s “highly likely that by 2030 we’ll know what pathway we’ve taken”, “the pathway towards sustainability or the current pathway towards likely collapse”.

“I think the ‘fork in the road’ will come in this decade, probably not a single point in time but as a series of events,” said Steffen. [mw: based on past warnings from climate scientists what have been unheeded decade after decade, we have already past the point of the fork in the road time and time again]

Steffen told Voice of Action he believes collapse “will likely not come as a dramatic global collapse, but rather as overall deterioration in many features of life, with regional collapses occurring here and there”.

“For example, it appears that the USA is entering a long period of decline in many aspect of its society, with a potential for a more rapid collapse in the coming decade,” said Steffen.

Samuel Alexander, a lecturer with the University of Melbourne and research fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, told Voice of Action that the coming collapse would not be a single black or white event.

“With respect to civilisations, what is more likely is that we have entered a stage of what JM Greer calls ‘catabolic collapse’ – where we face decades of ongoing crises, as the existing mode of civilisation deteriorates, but then recovers as governments and civil society tries to respond, and fix things, and keep things going for a bit longer,” said Alexander.

“Capitalism is quite good at dodging bullets and escaping temporary challenges to its legitimacy and viability. But its condition, I feel is terminal.”

Alexander, who studies the economic, political and cultural challenges of living on a full planet in an age of limits, believes the future will be “post-growth / post capitalist / post-industrial in some form”.

“The future will like arrive in part by design and in part by disaster. Our challenge is to try to constitute the future through planning and community action, not have the future constitute us,” said Alexander.

Alexander said that it would never be “too late” to act sensibly as whether we’re trying to avoid or manage collapse there is lots of work to be done (“a 3 degree future is better than a 4 degree future”).

Steffen believes the current US mass uprisings are not a sign of collapse but one of “growing instability”.

Alexander said it was a sign of “steam building up within a closed system”. Without bold grassroots and political action we were “likely to see explosions of civil unrest increasingly as things continue to deteriorate”.

“As economies deteriorate and as inequalities deepen, more people get disenfranchised, incentivising resistance and sadly sometimes making people look for scapegoats to blame for new or intensifying hardships (e.g. the so-called alt-right),” said Alexander. 

Funding dried up after inconvenient truths

When Turner joined CSIRO in the early 2000s the organisation was working on the Australian Stocks and Flows Framework – a model of the economy using physical things rather than dollars.

The work was funded by the Department of Immigration but Turner says the reports – the last of which was done in 2010 – were buried because the conclusions did not support high population growth.

The research found the economic benefits in terms of wealth per person would be outweighed by social ills including the impact on quality of life and the environment from resource use and pollution. The reports warned there would be nil net flow to the Darling River, loss of habitat and animal and plant species, traffic congestion, city water deficits and reduced biodiversity due to polluted creeks.

Turner’s findings went against the neoliberal orthodoxies as they challenged the notion of infinite growth on a finite planet. He said he and others pursuing similar research in “stocks and flows” models of the economy “found it harder and harder to get work funded”.

It is no wonder then that the latest Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration report found “there is no literature that synthesises the large scale impacts that climate change could have on Australia’s economy, and no reliable snapshot of Australia’s economic vulnerability to future climate warming in a regional and global context”.

Steffen said he hadn’t received any political pressure over his work “but I probably haven’t attacked the growth/capitalism paradigm as directly as Graham [Turner] has”. He says he has not hesitated to note the incompatibility of the neoliberal economic system with a stable Earth system in his talks.

“It seems obvious that very fundamental changes are required, all the way down to core values – what do we really value in life?,” said Steffen.

Turner said the “absolutely immense changes” required to deliver a sustainable future were just “too hard for the vast majority of people to contemplate”.

“You’d have to halve the birth rate, you’d have to have net zero immigration, you’d have to go totally renewable energy and double efficiencies in every sector of the economy, and the really key thing is you’d have to reduce the working week over time so that it would become half of what it is,” said Turner.

“But that would also mean that people wouldn’t have the same level of income and it goes hand in hand with reducing household consumption by half. And unless you do all of those things, you don’t achieve a steady state, sustainable future, and if you leave some things out you’ve got to go even harder at the others.”

Turner believes it would be possible to provide for everyone’s needs in a sustainable way but we would have to live a 1950s or 1960s-style lifestyle with limits such as one car and TV per household. We wouldn’t be living in caves and we’d still have technology but the rate of change would be a lot slower.

“I think if we all manage to live a simpler and arguably more fulfilling life then it would be possible still with some technological advances to have a sustainable future, but it would seem that it’s more likely … that we are headed towards or perhaps on the cusp of a sort of global collapse,” Turner told Voice of Action.

Turner said he fears that the public at large won’t take the problem seriously enough and demand change until they’re “actually losing their jobs or losing their life or seeing their children directly suffer”. 

‘Potentially infinite costs of climate change’

The political discourse is about getting back to growth, supported by taxpayer-subsidised fossil fuels, but evidence shows that even if the government was committed to renewable energy, “green growth” is just not possible at a global scale.

A 2019 IMF Working Paper notes a growing agreement between economists and scientists “that risk of catastrophic and irreversible disaster is rising, implying potentially infinite costs of unmitigated climate change, including, in the extreme, human extinction”.

The Australian-based Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration has spent years publishing reports warning that the science shows we are headed for civilisational collapse. They stress there is no further carbon budget today for a realistic chance of staying below 2°C, so there can be no further fossil fuel expansion.

The Breakthrough reports have been critical of the scientific community – including the IPCC – for underplaying the full risks of climate change particularly the tipping points and existential risk. Its latest report, Fatal Calculations, takes aim at economists for failing to adequately account for costs of inaction in their models, which in turn has been used by politicians to delay action.

“Despite the escalating climate disasters globally, not least our bushfires, this preoccupation with the cost of action — and a blind eye turned to overwhelming future damage — remains the dominant thinking within politics, business and finance,” the Breakthrough report found.

“Because climate change is now an existential threat to human society, risk management and the calculation of potential future damages must pay disproportionate attention to the high-end, extreme possibilities, rather than focus on middle-of-the-spectrum probabilities.”

In a discussion paper released in May, titled COVID-19 climate lessons, Breakthrough draws parallels between climate change and the lack of preparedness for the pandemic.

“The world is sleepwalking towards disaster. The UN climate science and policymaking institutions are not fit-for-purpose and have never examined or reported on the existential risks,” the paper reads.

“There are no national or global processes to ensure that such risk assessments are undertaken and are efficacious. The World Economic Forum reports on high-end global risks, including climate disruption, once a year and then everybody goes back to ignoring the real risks.”

Human activity is causing temperature rises beyond the envelope of natural variability that the biosphere is built to support. Steffen said there’s only been two times in the last 100 million years that we have seen a spike in temperature like this, the first was when the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago and the second was another mass extinction event 56 million years ago.

The last time atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions were at the current level was during the early-to-mid Pliocene 3–4 million years ago, when temperatures were around 3°C warmer than the late 19th century, and sea levels were around 25 metres higher. 

Government failing to meet the challenge

Despite recent bushfires which burnt 35 million hectares, caused 445 excess deaths from smoke and incinerated 1 billion animals – doubling Australia’s annual CO2 emissions in the process – the government is refusing to commit to even modest emissions reduction targets and is pushing a “gas-fired recovery”.

It has emerged this week that the government was warned about the likelihood of severe bushfires but failed to do enough to prepare. Fire chiefs were also gagged from talking about climate change.

The Great Barrier Reef this year was hit with its third mass bleaching event in 5 years.

The Australian government, beholden to the fossil fuel industry and with no corruption watchdog to keep it in check, continues to resist pressure to increase its climate change commitment. Australia will not even be able to meet its Paris targets without an accounting loophole – targets which themselves are inadequate to prevent collapse.

It’s not just climate change that is leading us to collapse but also the fact that nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history.

Around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades. As Steffen notes, the web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed.

Humans thoroughly dominate the land biosphere making up 32% of all terrestrial biomass followed by around 65% in domesticated animals, leaving less than 3% of vertebrate wildlife.

There has also been what’s called “The Great Acceleration”, whereby human population and economic growth is accelerating leading to accelerating use of resources like water and energy. This has also led to exponential growth in: greenhouse gas emissions, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, surface temperatures, marine fish capture, terrestrial biosphere degradation, tropical forest lost and domesticated land.

Many countries, including parts of Australia, are running out of water and having to truck in bottled water. It is predicted that 1.8 billion people will be living in water-scarce regions by 2025.

Steffen says net zero emissions by 2050 would be “too late” and the only thing that will save us are radical solutions committing to:

• No new fossil fuel developments of any kind from now
• A 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 100% renewable energy 
• Reaching net zero emissions by 2040

Steffen says it’s much, much cheaper not to use fossil fuels in the first place than to try to capture the CO2 after the fact, as you’re “fighting the second law of thermodynamics when you’re trying to recapture CO2”.

Turner believes the Corporations Act should be rewritten “so that corporations don’t have more legal rights than people, and are not compelled to make a profit for shareholders”. 

‘We’re possibly gone already’

Associate Professor Anitra Nelson, honorary principal fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, advocates for “de-growth” policies which would reduce global consumption and production to sustainable levels. She says we’re currently consuming resources as if there were four Earths and if we don’t change fast we will face conditions that we can’t survive under.

“On the current trajectory we’re possibly gone already, and if we’re not, unless we act very quickly and in very serious ways we just can’t get back into a kind of balance with nature,” Nelson told Voice of Action.

“I do actually think we’re already into the collapse and it’s just likely to get worse and more quickly worse as we go.” [mw: few who truly think this will actually publicly admit it; it's just too hard psychologically to do so, especially as it inevitably is met with resistance and backlash of one form or another, including social ostracism]

Nelson said we have to wholesale change how we live on this planet and that includes discussions about population control (such as restrictions on the number of kids people have) and even maximum income limits.

Nelson said we also need to get rid of capitalism as fundamentally that economic system could not survive without growth.

Instead of firms competing in a global market we need to be “localising economies” so that “basically people are producing locally for local needs and only basic needs”. This would involve having “autonomous communities” with “substantive and direct democracy” and consensus decision making.

Tim Buckley, director of energy finance studies at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), told Voice of Action that our economic model “will have to change or collapse” as “we are reaching the limits to growth”. The health and social costs were increasingly evident and “we are getting to [mw: at / beyond] the point where it can’t be avoided”.

“I think global capitalism is realising that the parasitical nature that has emerged (where the top 1% own the vast majority of the world’s wealth), can only be sustained for so long,” said Buckley.

“If they kill the host (the bottom 99% of the people), their position in absolute terms is worse off, even if they own all the wealth, the total pie will shrink, and they are most impacted. So in order to protect their ‘elite’ position, they will allow changes to make the model more sustainable, so they can remain the top 1%, but sharing a little more to make the model more sustainable.” [mw: the covid-inspired Great Reset?]

Buckley is more optimistic than most in that he believes the world’s financial elites will reorganise the global economy to become sustainable out of self preservation.

“The economics of renewables make this economically sensible. It is not about saving the poor of the world. It is about an economic reality – solar is killing coal fired power plant investments. Technology and economics win, not environmentalism.”

Tim Garrett, physicist/professor of atmospheric sciences who hypothesised that civilization is effectively a heat engine whose power is expressed in the form of economic growth, admits that we will never decarbonize. Collapse of Industrial Civilization. Dec. 6, 2020.

It’s rather jarring to see an expert like Tim Garrett, whose work I have followed for many years, come out and say so bluntly that we will not do the steps needed to save ourselves.

...

The reality that humans are causing the climate to warm, with catastrophic consequences, demands radical government intervention in the market as well as collective action on an unprecedented scale. This has been known for decades and those catastrophic consequences are now coming to fruition, yet we remain a carbon-based, growth-oriented civilization.

The Impact of Evolutionary Pressures on Economic Narratives.  Carey W. King, CASSE. Dec. 9, 2020. 

We cannot fully understand a proponent (or detractor) of the fossil or renewable energy narratives without also contemplating their position within the economic narratives. At one end of the spectrum is technological optimism and perpetual GDP growth, and at the other end is technological realism and the need for a steady state economy or even degrowth toward a steady state economy. 

... 

Biophysical economic models with realistic dynamics, finite resource constraints, and a direct representation of natural resource flows among parts of the economy (including the original model used within the original Limits to Growth book from 1972) have proven more capable of representing long-term trends of the economy, such as population and energy consumption, than have the conventional economic growth models that rely on equilibrium principles and either exogenous or endogenous “technological change” without directly accounting for flows of biological and physical resources

Market-based solutions to climate change have failed to deliver. David G. Viktor and David Dollar, Brookings. Dec. 21, 2020.

Much of the U.S. Could Be Uninhabitable by 2050. via nakedcapitalism. Dec. 1, 2020.

Topic: Climate Change Depression

originally posted Sept 2016; most recently updated January July 2019. Dec 2020


F*ck That: An Honest Meditation

Some fruits of meditation. Ian Welsh.

2020 addition:

Hiding in Plain Sight. Jonathan Foley. Dec. 5, 2020.

[Dr. Jonathan Foley is a renowned climate scientist, sustainability expert, educator, and public speaker. He is also executive director of Project Drawdown — the world’s leading resource for climate solutions. His work focuses on finding solutions to sustain the climate, ecosystems, and natural resources we all depend on.

Foley’s work has led him to become a trusted advisor to governments, foundations, non-profits, and business leaders around the world. He and his colleagues have made major contributions to our understanding of climate change, ecosystems, and the sustainability of the world’s resources. He has published over 130 peer-reviewed scientific articles, including many highly cited works in Nature and Science. He is among the top 1 percent most-cited scientists in the world.]

I’ve been dealing with depression my entire life. It’s been a miserable experience, and it’s taken years to learn how to manage it. But one thing that helped was learning that many people I admire are struggling with depression too. So, despite the risk of going public, I’m going to share my experience, in hopes that it might help someone else.

... In the public sphere, I have been deeply moved by Dr. Susanna Harris, a brilliant young biologist and science communicator who shared her story. I was blown away by Dr. Santa Ono, the President of the University of British Columbia, who now openly discusses his history with mental illness. I am also deeply moved by the books of Matt Haig, who makes depression relatable, and the work of radio personality and author, John Moe.

Articles:

The Best Medicine for My Climate Grief. Peter Kalmus, Yes!Magazine. Aug. 9, 2018.

A climate scientist talks to a psychologist about coping with the crushing stress related to climate change. Here’s what he learned.

... To think daily about climate change and any of its dire implications can be a crushing psychological burden. Each of us is just one mammal, with all our mammalian limitations—we get tired, sad, irritated, sick, overwhelmed—and the climate crisis wields the force of 8 billion humans with infrastructure, corporations, capital, politics, and imaginations heavily invested in burning fossil fuel.

“It’s important to remember that inaction is rarely about a lack of concern or care, but is so much more complex,” Lertzman said. “Namely, that we westerners are living in a society that is still deeply entrenched in the very practices we now know are damaging and destructive. This creates a very specific kind of situation—what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. Unless we know how to work with this dissonance, we will continue to come up against resistance, inaction, and reactivity.” 

I’ve been working through my own climate dissonance since 2006, back when the atmospheric carbon concentration was just 380 parts per million. That year I reached a tipping point in my own awareness of what was happening and what it meant. It was challenging to carry that knowledge when no one close to me seemed to care. But, said Lertzman, “we need to be careful not to make assumptions about other people’s relationships with these issues. Even if people may not be showing it, research shows again and again that it’s still on their minds and a source of discomfort or distress.” If she’s right, maybe the sea change in public action we desperately need is closer than it seems. It would certainly be helpful if we could talk openly about how climate change is making us feel.

It’s the End of the World as They Know It. The distinct burden of being a climate scientist. David Corn, Mother Jones. July 8, 2019.

So what is it like to be cursed with foreknowledge that others ignore? Peter Kalmus, who received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard and Columbia, respectively, spent about a decade working in astrophysics. He then moved to ecological forecasting based on satellite data, and something shifted for him. “Studying earth science and thinking about climate change is a totally different ballgame than thinking about astrophysics,” he says. “Astrophysics was pure science. I was looking for gravitational waves. It had no implication for the possible collapse of human civilization.” But the unrelenting momentum of climate change does. “I’m always thinking about it,” he says. “That can be a burden. Whenever friends talk about flying off to vacation, I feel compelled to point out the large carbon cost to flying. I’d like to take a vacation from thinking about it. I’m not sure that is psychologically possible.”

... 

Sarah Myhre, a former senior research associate at the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography, experiences “a profound level of grief on a daily basis because of the scale of the crisis that is coming, and I feel I’m doing all I can but it’s not enough,” she says. “I don’t have clinical depression. I have anxiety exacerbated by the constant background of doom and gloom of science

... 

Jacquelyn Gill, a paleontologist at the University of Maine who co-hosts a podcast on climate change called Warm Regards, says she’s “not depressed but angry, all the time, and anger can be empowering or debilitating. I swing between both. Being constantly angry is exhausting.” But, she adds, it takes a certain resilience to be a scientist in America: “There are so few jobs, so few grants. You’re always dealing with rejection. You have to have a built-in ability to say ‘fuck it.’”

... 

Katharine Wilkinson, who has a Ph.D. in geography and the environment, is vice president for communication and engagement at Project Drawdown, a group of scientists and activists that assembles proposed climate change solutions. She makes a distinction between denialism and bystanderism, which takes the form of people saying “they care about it” but not engaging in meaningful action: “That’s when I want to shake people and say, ‘You know how little time we have?’” She has noticed that almost everyone in her line of work seems “to have one dark emotion that is dominant. For some, it’s anger or rage. For me, it’s deep grief—having eyes wide open to what is playing out in our world, and we have a lukewarm response to it. There is no way for me not to have a broken heart most days.” 

For several years, Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist-turned journalist, has written about his own efforts to contend with climate change–induced depression. “I lose sleep over climate change almost every single night,” he wrote last year. “I can’t remember how long this has been happening, but it’s been quite a while, and it’s only getting worse.

... 

Michael Mann, the well-known climate scientist who has spent years clashing with climate deniers, observes that “colleagues who have convinced themselves we have crossed a tipping point—physical or political—and we won’t avert catastrophic climate change clearly become depressed.”

Uncovering the Mental Health Crisis of Climate Change: How to move people from apathy to action. Jeremy Deaton, Nexus Media. July 7, 2018.

The Threat Of Climate Change Brings Both Anxiety & Apathy.

The young man believed he only had five years to live. “Not because he was sick,” said Kate Schapira, “not because anything was wrong with him, but because he believed that life on Earth would be impossible for humans.”

The sign on Schapira’s booth read: CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING 5¢ THE DOCTOR IS IN. Time to earn her pennies.

On that muggy June day, she had set up shop in Kennedy Plaza in downtown Providence, Rhode Island. Schapira is not a trained therapist — a fact she makes clear to visitors — but she is happy to chat with anyone suffering from anxiety about climate change. “A lot of what I do is listen and ask questions,” she said.

Over the coming decades, rising temperatures will fuel natural disasters that are more deadly than any seen in human history, destabilizing nations and sending millions to their death. Experts say that we need to prepare for a hotter, less hospitable world by building sea walls, erecting desalination plants and engineering crops that can withstand punishing heat and drought, but few have considered the defenses we need to erect in our minds. Some, like Shapira, have called for more talking, more counseling to process our grief. But will that be enough? Climate change will do untold violence to life on this planet, and we have remarkably few tools to deal with its emotional cost.

... 

The tall, sharply dressed man said humans were a cancer on the Earth. He said that he resented his parents for raising him to be “super hedonistic, just monstrously gaining things.” He said he had grown nihilistic, that he wanted to take up chain smoking and die a slow death. When Schapira asked if he was angry at his family, the young man replied, “I love my family. It’s so hard to know that you only have five years left to love people.” 

The man was undoubtedly troubled, his vision of the future decidedly more apocalyptic than the one offered by science. But, his anxieties were real and, perhaps, understandable given the dire predictions of climatologists. While none believes human civilization will crumble in the next five years, the forecasts get hazier 30, 40 or 50 years down the road. 

If we continue pumping out heat-trapping carbon pollution at the current rate, temperatures will rise by 4 degrees C by 2100, a level of warming climate scientist Kevin Anderson has called “incompatible with an organized global community.” As David Wallace-Wells explained in his bracing account of the terrors of climate change for New York magazine, “Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.” 

Climate change promises to take a massive toll, not just on nature or human society, but on our minds.

... 

Lertzman explained that to grasp the full implications of climate change is daunting — to recognize our part in it all the more so. To fire up a car or step onto an airplane is to defile the very air we breathe. People cope by disavowing their role in climate change. “You’re not denying something, but you are choosing not to know,” Lertzman said. “There rarely is genuine apathy,” she added. “What shows up as apathy is a defense mechanism. It’s a way for people to cope with the very complicated feelings that come up around these issues.” 

Like Lertzman, other mental health professionals have warned of the mental and emotional impact of climate change. Psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren coined the term “pre-traumatic stress disorder” to describe the pervasive dread felt by many scientists, advocates and journalists. In the years ahead, she said, the problem will only grow more widespread. 

... 

Climate depression is for real. Just ask a scientist. Madeleine Thomas, Grist. Oct. 28, 2014.

“I don’t know of a single scientist that’s not having an emotional reaction to what is being lost,” Parmesan is quoted saying in the National Wildlife Federation’s 2012 report, “The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States: And Why the U.S. Mental Health Care System is Not Adequately Prepared.” 

“It’s gotten to be so depressing that I’m not sure I’m going to go back to this particular site again,” she says, referring to an ocean reef she has studied since 2002, “because I just know I’m going to see more and more of it dead, and bleached, and covered with brown algae.” 

Lise Van Susteren, a forensic psychiatrist based in Washington, D.C. — and co-author of the National Wildlife Federation’s report — calls this emotional reaction “pre-traumatic stress disorder,” a term she coined to describe the mental anguish that results from preparing for the worst, before it actually happens. 

“It’s an intense preoccupation with thoughts we cannot get out of our minds,” Van Susteren says.

The psychological effects of global warming on the United States. And why the U.S. mental healthcare system is not adequately prepared. National Wildlife Federation. Feb. 2012.


A talking cure for climate-based depression? It worked for Renee Lertzman. Heather Smith, Grist. Feb. 18, 2016.


Climate change is wreaking havoc on our mental health, experts say. Tyler Hamilton, The Star. Feb. 28, 2016.


It’s Time to Talk About Ecological Grief. Michaela Cavanagh, UnDark. Jan. 10, 2019. 

As climate change marches forward, it will exact a mounting, tangible toll on our collective mental health and productivity.

What Mary Oliver can teach us about dealing with climate grief. Eric Holthaus, grist. Jan. 22, 2019.


Dancing with Ulysses. Albert Bates. Feb. 9, 2019.


Reports:

Beyond Storms and Droughts: The Psychological Impacts of Climate Change. American Psychological Association.

Psychology and global climate change. APA.

Hope, despair and transformation: Climate change and the promotion of mental health and wellbeing.  Jessica Fritze et al, International Journal of Mental Health Systems. June 2008.

Sites:

Active Hope. How to face the mess we're in without going crazy.

Psychologists for social responsibility. Program on climate change, sustainability and psychology.

Transformational resilience. The Resource Innovation Group.

Ecological Buddhism. A Buddhist response to global warming.


Videos:

Joanna Macy and the Great Turning.

Mental Health and Climate Change. TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin. via youtube. Dec. 4, 2018.

Burnout and Despair: Studying the Climate. The Agenda. Jan. 15, 2019.


Conferences:

ITRC Conference To Highlight How Building Build Human Resilience for Climate Change Can Increase Wellbeing & Cut Emissions!
Nov 3-4, 2016. Washington, DC.

Climate Links: November 2020

There is no time to lose. Arctic News. Nov. 25, 2020.

Carbon dioxide levels continue at record levels, despite COVID-19 lockdown, the WMO reports. The increase in carbon dioxide from 2018 to 2019 was larger than that observed from 2017 to 2018 and larger than the average annual growth rate over the last decade.

The rise has continued in 2020. The lockdown did cut emissions of many pollutants and greenhouse gases, but any impact on carbon dioxide levels - the result of cumulative past and current emissions - is in fact no bigger than the normal year to year fluctuations. 

“Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries and in the ocean for even longer. The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO₂ was 3-5 million years ago, when the temperature was 2-3°C warmer and sea level was 10-20 meters higher than now. But there weren’t 7.7 billion inhabitants,” said WMO Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas.

Accelerated global warming and stadial cooling events: IPCC oversights regarding future climate trends. Andrew Glikson, via Arctic News. Nov. 16, 2020.

The linear nature of global warming projections by the IPCC (2014) Assessment Report (AR5) (Figure 1) appears to take little account of stadial cooling events, such as have followed peak temperature rises in previous interglacial stages. The linear trends appear to take only limited account of amplifying positive feedback effects of the warming from land and ocean. A number of factors cast doubt on IPCC climate change projections to 2100 AD and 2300 AD, including:

• The flow of large volumes of cold ice melt water into the oceans, leading to stadial cooling effects, such as in the North Atlantic (Rahmstorf et al 2015; Glikson, 2019) and around Antarctica (Bonselaer et al., 2018).
• Paleoclimate observations indicate that during the Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles, at least for the 800,000 years, every time temperatures reached a peak a sharp cooling followed (Cortese et al. 2007).
• Amplifying feedbacks from land and ocean drive non-linear climate trajectories, due to a lowered capacity of the warming oceans to absorb CO₂, the release of CO₂ from desiccated vegetation and extensive bushfires, decrease in reflection due to melting of ice sheets, increase in infrared absorption by open water and exposed rock surfaces, discharge of methane from melting permafrost and from methane clathrates.

However, global temperature measurements for 2015-2020 indicate accelerated warming due to both the greenhouse effect reinforced by a solar radiation maximum (Hansen and Sato 2020) (Figure 2).

The weakening of the northern Jet stream, due to polar warming and thus reduced longitudinal temperature contrasts, allows penetration of warm air masses into the polar region and consequent fires (Figure 3). The clash between tropical and polar air and water masses (Figure 3A) leads to regional storminess and contrasting climate change trajectories in different parts of the Earth, in particular along land-ocean boundaries and island chains.

The weakening of the jet stream and migration of climate zones constitute manifestations of an evolving Earth’s energy imbalance¹, namely a decrease in reflection of solar radiation from Earth to space and thereby global warming. Earth retained 0.6 Watt/m² during 2005-2010 and 0.87 Watt/m² during 2010-2020 (Hansen and Sato 2020), primarily due to a rise in greenhouse gases but also due to a solar radiation peak. During 2015-2020 global warming rates exceeded the 1970-2015 warming rate of 0.18°C/per decade, a deviation greater than climate variability. Hansen and Sato (2020) conclude the accelerated warming is caused by an increasing global climate forcing, specifically by the role of atmospheric aerosols.

....

The consequences for future climate change trends include:

• Further expansion of the tropical climate zones and a polar-ward shift of intermediate climate zones, leading to encroachment of subtropical deserts over fertile Mediterranean zones.
• Spates of regional to continent-scale fires, including in Brazil, Siberia, California, around the Mediterranean, Australia.
• A weakened undulating jet stream (Figure 3) allowing penetration of and clashes between warm and cold air and water masses, with ensuing storms.
• In Australia the prolonged drought, low vegetation moisture, high temperatures and warm winds emanating from the northern Indian Ocean and from the inland, rendering large parts of the continent tinder dry and creating severe fire weather subject to ignition by lightning.
• The delayed melting of the large ice sheets due to hysteresis², would be followed by sea level rise to Pliocene levels, ~25 meters above pre-industrial levels, once sea level reaches equilibrium with temperature of 2 to 3 degrees Celsius or higher, changing the geography of the continents.

An earth system model shows self-sustained melting of permafrost even if all man-made GHG emissions stop in 2020. Jorgen Randers. Nov. 12, 2020.

Abstract
The risk of points-of-no-return, which, once surpassed lock the world into new dynamics, have been discussed for decades. Recently, there have been warnings that some of these tipping points are coming closer and are too dangerous to be disregarded. In this paper we report that in the ESCIMO climate model the world is already past a point-of-no-return for global warming. In ESCIMO we observe self-sustained melting of the permafrost for hundreds of years, even if global society stops all emissions of man-made GHGs immediately. We encourage other model builders to explore our discovery in their (bigger) models, and report on their findings. The melting (in ESCIMO) is the result of a continuing self-sustained rise in the global temperature. This warming is the combined effect of three physical processes: (1) declining surface albedo (driven by melting of the Arctic ice cover), (2) increasing amounts of water vapour in the atmosphere (driven by higher temperatures), and (3) changes in the concentrations of the GHG in the atmosphere (driven by the absorption of CO2 in biomass and oceans, and emission of carbon (CH4 and CO2) from melting permafrost). This self-sustained, in the sense of no further GHG emissions, melting process (in ESCIMO) is a causally determined, physical process that evolves over time. It starts with the man-made warming up to the 1950s, leading to a rise in the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere-further lifting the temperature, causing increasing release of carbon from melting permafrost, and simultaneously a decline in the surface albedo as the ice and snow covers melts. To stop the self-sustained warming in ESCIMO, enormous amounts of CO2 have to be extracted from the atmosphere.

No Matter Who Wins. Nate Hagens. Nov. 1, 2020.

Modern elections—despite their social and political importance—have become more like sporting events than referendums around ideas. We so intensely identify with our partisan tribe, that we focus on the slogans, the rooting against the ‘other guy’ and other us-vs-them dynamics, and often lose sight of the issues, the context, and how ‘winning’ for our country (and world) might actually be influenced by our choices.

We are inherently tribal, after all. Of all of our inherited ancestral heuristics, defending our (historically small) tribe and ostracizing/rooting against the other tribe is one of the strongest human universals. In fact, perhaps humans’ best quality – cooperation and collaboration – was a byproduct of the strong unity born out of common threats, accessing surplus, and tribal warfare. We cooperate – for the good of our group – and for tens/hundreds of thousands of years, this meant survival.

Fast forward to November 2020, USA and the four year inflection point where half the country is rooting for Joe Biden and the other half (roughly) for Donald Trump – in our minds we know this election is an important guidepost for our collective future, but we approach this week with similar temperament and behavior as a Packer/Viking pre-game tailgate.

We are now in the liminal space between our nation’s long history and uncertain future. Facts and expertise matter less by the day. Emotions and tribal affiliations rivet our attention on the ‘cars’ instead of focusing at the road ahead of us. Later this week 50% of our population will be elated and the other 50% will be angry. And most of both camps will be variously: righteous, anxious and uncertain, and perhaps violent. This, along with the various trivia of Democrat and Republican victories and defeats will be the hyper-focus of our media. But below, in no particular order, is a look at some of the critical guideposts of the next 4 years along the winding road of our collective future that – as colleagues, citizens and neighbors in the United States of America, we’ll have to navigate with each other – no matter who wins the election.

COVID 19- Spilling into 2021

As I wrote in March, the ‘cure’ (lockdowns) for COVID would be worse than the disease in aggregate impact. Though death rates were perhaps overblown, the virulence -and ‘long COVID complications’ were not. Various vaccines and treatments and protocols will be developed but the worst months may still be ahead of us. This virus may or may not ultimately have a cure, but either way COVID has permanently redirected the vascular system of the human superorganism, explained below. No matter who wins the election, the Coronavirus will still be with us. And we’ll have to respond in creative ways.

V vs K

Economies tanked in the 2nd quarter and – on the backs of stimulus and central bank support – roared back in Q3. Through July 31, 2020 -when direct stimulus ran out – the US government was responsible for fully 25% of our national wages. While the professional class (and tech companies) are experiencing a sharp V recovery, many hourly workers, small businesses, retail, leisure, transportation, restaurants are seriously struggling. Many people are hanging on via donations and loans from friends and family and ‘food insecurity’ is becoming widespread. The conventional thinking is that in either a Democratic or Republican ‘sweep’, considerably more stimulus (aka borrowing from future to consume today) will arrive. If, there is e.g. a Biden win and the Senate stays Republican, continued government stabilization of the economic patient will be in jeopardy, and many systemic risks ensue.

But headline GDP statistics aside, the pandemic has widened already large disparities between the haves and have nots. The COVID recession is the most unequal one in US history. As we recover – or don’t – distribution of resources within our population is going to be a critical issue – (more on this below). At some point if the have nots have nothing, they may be forced to take from the haves – or do without. No matter who wins the election we are going to have to find ways to support the weak, the vulnerable and the unemployed. And I expect these will number in the 10s of millions.

Ideology, Memes and Icebergs


If you haven’t been asleep, traveling or drugged these past few years, you’re aware there is a growing movement pointing out the racial, social and economic injustices of our current system. This is in large part because there are considerable racial, social and economic injustices in our current system. But fairness was never the objective built into our cultural goals or institutions – we optimize for (economic) efficiency, not fairness, nor for resilience. The situation is this: various demographics now quite vocally (and reasonably) want a larger share of the economic pie, but the pie itself is about to shrink, which is something few are aware of – and don’t like to hear/think about.

Let’s unpack this using an overused analogy – the Titanic. On the Titanic were 3 classes of passengers – First Class, Second Class and Steerage (or 3rd Class). You can imagine the conversations, hopes, dreams and concerns of the various people on that ship over a century ago. And, history tells us that the tragedy did not befall each class equally – 39% of 1st class passengers perished, 58% of 2nd class and 76% of steerage passengers drowned. The same demographics exist today and are probably having similar conversations within and between groups, focused on maintaining status, moving up in class, or demanding better conditions.

And then there is someone like me – shouting (to all 3 classes) that we just hit an iceberg and need to use science, discourse, reason and planning to find the best solution to navigating evacuation, lifeboats and a new course. You can imagine the reaction – indeed you see it in the news and in your town hall meetings. The ‘first class passengers’ publicly decry that there is no iceberg that technology would never allow the ship to hit an iceberg let alone sink (but privately they are looking to ‘lifeboats’ aka gated communities and the like). The second class passengers are scrambling like mad to ingratiate themselves to the first class passengers to get crumbs of surplus lest they slip into steerage. And the steerage passengers – a full 50%+ of American society today have 2 common responses: 1) “Ok sure there may be an iceberg, but we need to solve our more immediate concerns like our current unacceptable living/working conditions, because we’ll drown from those before any freaking iceberg” (they have valid points) or 2) “Ya right, an iceberg -that is just another story by elites and governments telling us what we have to do and taking away our rights and freedoms”. The difference now (vs on the actual Titanic) is that the steerage class (economically) houses both the far left and the far right, effectively creating additional ‘iceberg’ conditions within the ship itself. The people in ‘steerage’ can’t easily process that in addition to their current challenges, society ALSO has hit an iceberg (see below).

The point here is that the narratives (and religions) that make people feel good are often not based on reality. Which makes discussing, planning and responding to ‘the iceberg of the 2020s’ a very difficult task. The key will be to acknowledge the moral failings of our economic and cultural past while simultaneously acknowledging and planning the lifeboat situation. That’s a difficult thing for a human mind to do.

No matter who wins the election we will be faced with multiple non-overlapping memes and explanations for the upheaval that is coming. Our plight is biophysical (biology and physics) in nature but will be blamed on class, race, politics, and ideology. Navigating this is going to be exceedingly difficult. A new captain can change the morale and surround himself by great minds to make the best civic decisions, but he/she cannot change the fact that our economy and culture has hit an iceberg.

The Zombies are Coming

The central bank purchases and guarantees of various offerings of debt has turned the financial system into a digital Rube Goldberg machine. One of the externalities is that – while the economy was suffering from an exogenous shock from COVID – public companies used the FED bond guarantees to raise cheap debt. For instance, Boeing – a company who arguably will come out of the COVID crisis with worse business prospects due to less demand for planes – nearly doubled its long term debt because it could do so at low rates (the bonds being guaranteed by the FED). This means Boeing – and many other companies – will emerge from this crisis with both lower revenues and higher debt loads, putting them at risk of becoming ‘zombies’. Zombie companies are those whose profits are not enough to pay their interest payments – and they need to take on even more debt (or get direct aid from governments) to stay solvent.

Yes – it’s true stock markets are near all time highs. But this too is a distribution (and expectation) problem. Going into Q3 earnings, the five largest S&P 500 stocks (AAPL, MSFT, AMZN, GOOGL, FB) were expected to grow 3Q sales and EPS by +13% and +1% while the other 495 stocks in SP500 are expected to have a -5% revenue drop and a -24% drop in EPS.

Some great companies. Lots of zombies. No matter who wins this election, we (and the rest of developed world) are going to face a large and growing number of bankrupt and insolvent companies. Stimulus will help – and is critically necessary – but isn’t a long-term solution. And, as the government takes on more and more of this burden, it too risks zombification.

A Cul-de-Sac – and Full of Cans


At year end 2019 we were still recovering from the Great Recession -the ‘temporary’ measures initiated in 2008 – artificially low interest rates, too big to fail guarantees, Quantitative Easing, explosion of government debt, expansion of central bank balance sheets, etc. are still in effect a dozen years later. Even with all this, productivity gains have been tiny – and a fraction of earlier decades.

Now, in addition to all this, governments are adding fiscal stimulus – because they must. The little green man behind the curtain – (currently Jerome Powell) is a very capable and good person but he is not superman. The institution he oversees - the Federal Reserve – is using a giant, and mostly invisible, magic wand to beam what we might’ve consumed in 2030 or 2040 forward to 2020 (in the process leaving less available in 2030 and 2040). Modern Monetary Theory tells us deficits don’t matter – but from a biophysical lens they do – when we create money, we do not create the energy and materials needed to pay it back, so adding more and more debt becomes less productive over time – and has limits, both for companies, for nations, and for economic systems.

What happens when either the government decides to stop stimulus (hard to imagine) or the bond market says ‘no mas’ via higher rates? What is the plan by either the Left or the Right (or anyone) for when QE and stimulus combined cannot plug the economic hole for people and businesses? My opinion is that this question will be answered before 2025 – and the answer will be a drop in GDP akin to the 1930s. Yes, more debt and creative stimulus/infrastructure spending will forestall this for a while, but we will soon face a situation when we can no longer kick the can of growing GDP again to the future. COVID is but a foreshadowing. Money isn’t reality – it’s a marker for the things that matter: built, social, natural and human capital. No matter who wins the election we have a 50+ year physical/financial bill that’s coming due.

Our Basement Larder, is -Unbeknown to Most – Going Bare



(Charts from Labyrinth Consulting. Assumptions: EIA & Enverus data through August 2020. Sept and Oct guided by EIA tight oil estimates plus Labyrinth estimates for OCS & conventional. Nov 2020 thru Nov 2021 calibrated speculation using to-date tight oil rig count and production correlation extrapolating 2020 ratio average for deep water & conventional production.)


If you took a poll and asked people what the single biggest casualty was from the pandemic, very few people would respond with ‘oil’. But no matter who wins the election, US oil production, including shale oil, is about to fall off a cliff, with massive consequences for society. For the setup of our modern way of life, oil is effectively our hemoglobin – and the COVID arrow hit at the heart of the industry as market prices are far below what it costs to extract oil from the ground. Yet this is all invisible to most people as the media (and economics departments) still conflate price with cost and cost with value. We were in bad shape BEFORE Covid-19 and now the Red Queen (drilling faster and faster just to maintain static production) has stepped off the treadmill for 6+months – meaning the large underlying decline rates of existing fields are not being offset much by new drilling. Worse, most of the recent decline in production is because wells have been shut in. Many of these will never be brought back on line because they cannot meet basic operating expenses and production taxes at current oil prices. In aggregate, US production is so far down -2.28 mmbpd from a 2019 monthly average high of of 12.86 mmbpd. Assuming rig counts and prices stay roughly where they are (and with no stimulus they may get worse), this implies a level of about 7 mmbpd by late summer 2021 – nearly a 50% drop. Globally, the reduction in travel, leisure and transport due to COVID effectively squeezed upstream investment- we are down to 72.8 mb of crude and condensate from 84.6 in November 2018, -which date is highly likely to be the all time peak in global production. Note: this will likely never be recognized as such because there will always be a non-biophysical reason articulated as to why we aren’t getting more oil. E.g. ‘the chinese’ or ‘the environmentalists’ or ‘the war’.)

To label this geologic phenomenon as ‘peak demand for oil’ is the economic equivalent of saying the reindeer on St Matthew Island faced ‘peak demand for lichen’. Oil is the lifeblood of our (current) economy -peak demand for oil also likely means peak growth for economies (unless massive efficiencies and fuel switching occur very fast). We probably won’t notice any lack of oil for many years because affordability by citizens will likely decline faster than oil itself (unless massive stimulus and central bank bazookas arrive). Regardless an accelerated retiring of the fossil armies that do most of our work, and create and deliver our modern smorgasbord of goods and services is now on the horizon.

(Note: I think the graph from my friend Art may be a bit pessimistic, but maybe not. We face a biophysical gauntlet where the price citizens can afford is getting lower and lower and the price energy companies need is higher and higher. If governments guarantee high prices to oil companies, or there are other incentives, production might be higher than indicated here – but here is a glaring statistic – if we were to stop drilling in USA entirely we would lose around 40% of our entire oil production in 1 year – we have to keep investing/drilling in more difficult and costly spots to avoid such a decline. (the 1 year decline rates are: Texas 40%, ND is 52%, Oklahoma 50%, GOM/deepwater 32% New Mexico 45% – these 5 regions are 80% of US production).

This is not remotely being discussed in our culture.

No matter who wins the election, US oil production has peaked – again - and this time including the tight oil provinces – from the ‘source rock’. This will have….large long term consequences, whether one is left, right or libertarian.

Complexity

Increasingly I think it’s neither oil nor finance, nor social disruption that is our core risk but declining returns to complexity. 

Historian Joseph Tainter famously studied how ancient civilizations declined due to the inability of resources/productivity to keep pace with complexity. In today’s world, this can be seen in myriad ways, from the unemployment software in US States being written in COBOL and FORTRAN, to APIs for majority of our medicines made in India and China, to the paint for a Ford truck only made in Fukushima, Japan.

It’s not something we think about, but we all are part of a complex global supply chain. On the way up, using the concept of ‘comparative advantage’ our society outsourced various manufacturing to countries of the lowest cost production – which in many cases meant locations in Asia with cheap labor. COVID gave us a glimpse of the dangerous underbelly of those decades old decisions: almost 200 drugs currently listed as in short supply by FDA, 6 month wait for bicycles, heavy equipment delays etc. This is a separate issue from short term kinks in the supply chain for e.g. ammunition, canned goods, and toilet paper etc. This issue goes to the embedded fragility of a global system based on growth by perpetually relying on import substitution models of production.

No matter who wins the election, with the geopolitical context that is COVID 19 on financial steroids, making sure that important things are made domestically (or regionally) may become an important question.

Other Energy



Humans – during periods of growth – and contraction – self-organize around energy. Oil is central but our entire energy balance sheet is going to be a critical issue in the coming decade. Under a Biden win, various Green New Deal proposals will lead to a massive increase in scale for renewable energy. In many ways this is good news, because it will be good for GDP, it will create jobs, and grow our supply of low carbon energy. But the key problem with what’s coming is the goal is ‘lower carbon energy’ not ‘systemically addressing human futures’. 

Briefly: 1) renewable energy isn’t renewable, it’s rebuildable and requires vast amounts of non-energy materials, minerals and land 2) only ~20% of (current) energy mix is electricity which is the type of energy produced from most renewables 3) the higher % of RE in our mix the more important back up (NG and coal) will become – and the US is facing an impending gas shortage as US drilling has plummeted. (the largest growth component of supply was the associated gas from tight oil production), 4) the cost of RE isn’t merely adding some solar panels or wind turbines but the full system cost of integrating RE into the grid which will be higher than consumers currently pay, which will weigh on a fragile economy 5) all RE blueprints expect a LARGER economy in the future when (see above) most realistic scenarios using systemic analysis (finance, politics, biophysical inputs) point to a smaller economy.

Still, renewables are our only hope – they are mature, robust and inexpensive vis-à-vis even a decade ago. The problem will be how to ‘increase renewables to a smaller and more complex system’. No matter who wins the election, we will have to face a more complex and less dependable energy future.

Meaning and Well-being

One of the silver linings (if you will) of the pandemic is that now a great number of people are personally aware that US GDP/ 330 million does not represent how well we are doing as individuals or as a nation. The constant media reminders that the SP500 and Dow Jones just made all-time highs is incongruous with most peoples real lived experience (and most of whom have zero money in the stock market). Whether one understands or agrees with the risks of climate change, energy depletion or limits to growth, tens of millions of people are now hungry for living a decent life with access to basic needs, while doing something good and meaningful. The coming decades – by definition but also by desire – are going to be more about well-being than they are about growing our consumption of stuff.

No matter who wins the election, our nation needs to embark on a deep conversation about what our cultural goal is – we are going to need complementary metrics to the econometric measures quantifying how much energy we burned. What is all this energy for is a question that should be part of our national discourse.

Protecting Heaven

Lost in the discussions of Republicans vs Democrats, stimulus, PPP, COVID statistics, stock market gyrations and geopolitics is perhaps the most important story of all – the state of Earth’s ecosystems and the ~10 million species we share the planet with. They are ‘downstream’ of our elections and financial/economic systems, but none of them have a vote.

I have concluded that natural systems and species futures – for better or worse – are linked to human futures – we have to ‘bend not break’ to have the best outcome for (most) Earth Systems (other than perhaps oceans and very remote species). I believe humans are not any better or worse than we were 100 years, 1000 years or 100,000 years ago – there are just more of us so our impact is (much) larger and each and every one of us consuming much more resources than our ancestors did. Humans are good at heart but we are biological organisms following cultural goals that have expiry dates. We have arrived at a ‘species level’ juncture and need to use systems science, reason, discourse, and leadership to navigate a glide path to intact futures.

No matter who wins the election, the state of the natural world needs to be included in our plans and discussions. Unfortunately, it first needs to be included in our values.

Joy, Living, and Goals

The Great Depression, unless you lived in a big city, mostly happened in slow motion. Similarly, unless we’re very unlucky, the events of the coming decade will unfold gradually. We have to take it upon ourselves to civically engage, but also find time to enjoy and appreciate our lives – being alive at this amazing and perilous time.

We all have ‘conditional’ goals, those which rely on something external to us to change in order to succeed. Many of those goals will not get met because external conditions prevent them – perhaps the ‘guy who we didn’t vote for’ winning the election. The key is to also find “unconditional” goals – those which we ourselves can be 100% responsible for. That way we can feel more empowered to reach those goals, which many times can influence the conditional goals in positive ways. Growing food, spending time with your neighbors, learning a new (useful to the future) skill, mutual aid, etc. The key for all of us – is to meet the future halfway.

No matter who wins the election, life, and the opportunity for joy, impact, and meaning will exist, perhaps even more so.

The 2020 Election and beyond

So, dear reader and fellow countrymen/women, go vote. But voting is merely the beginning of our civic duty. Our country will be shaped by how we citizens respond to the challenges ahead of us as much (or more) than it will by which party wins the election. What am I rooting for? Rationality, science, civility, discourse, which opens up other potential pathways. Our culture is capable of much more than guns, germs and steel or being an energy dissipating superorganism.

People who practice common decency and respect are by far the majority in our (and other) countries. When matched with perseverance, common goals and prioritizing social capital and relationships, we might just happen upon the glide path to decent futures. There are 10s of millions of Americans craving having their basic needs met and just doing some good with their lives – they just don’t yet have a roadmap and convening place. Could such a thing be the emergent result of the 2020 election?

Society right now is dancing – and fighting on the roof of an A-frame with the winds blowing hard and a storm shooting lightning at our heads. We need to keep dancing (less fighting) while we climb down to more stable ground.

No matter who wins the election this week we are on the cusp of major change which will require both top-down and bottom up interventions and cultural emergence. I hope you can play a role.

The objective economy, part one. Tim Morgan, Surplus Energy Economics. Nov. 12, 2020