Doomerism

Doomerism as Lifestyle. Bates, The Great Change. Feb. 18, 2024.

"Some tipping points are worse than others. Human ones are the scariest."

Apocalyptic scenarios are what fuel Eliot Jacobson’s jaundiced outlook for most efforts to do something about climate change. Jacobson is a Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara. Here he is on Dan Miller’s Climate Chat on February 4, 2024:

Jacobson: I am an environmentalist and so I am in favor of the collapse of global industrial civilization, right? I am in favor of the human footprint on this planet becoming smaller just as quickly as it possibly can…. The problem is that these technologies are more likely to prolong civilization than to aid in its descent. All of the other things that humans are doing, whether it's destroying the biosphere through plastic pollution or what we're doing to our food production and how we treat animals, all of these other harms we are doing to the planet are only going to grow in scale. You're not going to put lithium in place of beef, right? As we create products that will allow civilization to maintain itself and grow even more, we're talking about destruction of our soils and that all boils down to even more suffering for a greater number of humans, even more suffering for a greater number of animals and species on the planet, even a larger ultimate extinction event, right?

You know we're going to hit the Seneca Cliff and the question is, how high up that cliff do we want to compel ourselves to go through these Al, alternative technologies before we go over it? So I'm not going to tell you that they don't work, right? … I think that's outweighed by the long-term impacts it has on allowing population to continue to grow and allowing the destruction of yet other ecosystems.

Miller: Not only would I describe you as a Doomer but I would describe you as a Promoter of Doom.

Jacobson: Yeah very much.

Miller: You're for doom because you think it will be better for the entire Earth or it'll be better for the environment.

Jacobson: Yeah, again, I am an environmentalist. And the best thing that could happen to this planet is to get rid of people.

Miller: Okay well that's very interesting. I didn't expect the conversation to go there, but uh I yeah I guess I don't agree. I mean, first of all, I don't disagree with sort of the premise and a lot of what you say….

Jacobson: We were using the example of [climate science writer and blogger] Michael Mann. Michael Mann is not an environmentalist. He is the opposite of an environmentalist. He is for the destruction of ecosystems. He is for new technologies that are going be placed on locations that are pristine, whether they're mines or fields of solar panels… wind turbines and ocean ecologies, right? He is for them with the idea that that would allow human civilization to continue to grow, which because of all the other impacts of humans will even further degrade various systems, right? So to call me the one who is pro-collapse actually… Michael Mann is setting the stage for a much larger collapse than I am. He said his idea is not just that 8 billion humans should collapse but that 10 or 12 billion humans should collapse. And on our way out we should create even more devastation to the planet, right? So, I absolutely disagree that Michael Mann is in favor of preserving the planet.

You get the point. If you favor green technology, you are just making it worse for the next generation, who will fall off a higher cliff when ecosystems implode. As alluring as I find this view, I am also chastened by the guest editorial that Tyler Austin Harper, assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College, wrote for The New York Times on January 26, 2024 entitled, “The 100-Year Extinction Panic Is Back, Right on Schedule”:

Our panics are often puffed up, our predictions simply wrong. Human life and labor were not superseded by machines, as some in the 1920s predicted. Or in the 1960s or in the 1980s, two other flash-in-the-pan periods of A.I. hype. The takeaway is not that we shouldn’t be worried but that we shouldn’t panic. Foretelling doom is an ancient human hobby, but we don’t appear to be very good at it.

My own take is that I read the same tea leaves Jacobson does. I get the points Hansen and Simons have raised about the curve of acceleration that global climate catastrophe has entered. And yet, I also recognize there is a lot of inertia in Earth’s systems and Gaia is trying to mend as best she can, all the time.

Harper wrote, “Transformation or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives.” Maybe we will get lucky. Maybe an errant genes similar to that of the autistic wolf from whom all modern dogs are descended (sociability genes WBSCR17, GTF2I and GTF2IRD1) will suddenly appear and transform the next generation of homo. Maybe we will all start singing Aquarius.

I’m not in favor of gene manipulation. I think we already have an altruistic gene and a heroic action gene. My efforts now are to muster those genes into service—to help Gaia mend. That may mean having fewer children and grandchildren. It may mean shutting down fossil mining and drilling and those damned nuclear whack-a-moles. I don’t think it means putting an end to Brian von Herzen’s re-greening of the marine food web or John D. Liu’s ecosystem regeneration camps. I don’t think it should stop us from creating more ecovillages, eco-districts, and eco-regions and showing the way to live in harmony with Earth and each other, practically, and with heart.

There is plenty of work to do, and all of it is rewarding, for however long we have.

There is a growing recognition that a viable path forward is towards a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Welsh: Granted That

And This God Has Granted To Me, That. Ian Welsh. Jan 31, 2024. 

I shall live to see the destruction of my enemies.

The great joy of watching the American government be humiliated, over and over again, as their empire collapses.

To watch as those they oppressed cease to fear them, as their enemies circle the old brute, nipping at their heels, tearing at them, as they dies innumerable wounds.

This, God has granted to me.

And so too has God granted to me to watch the end of Neoliberalism. “Greed is good” they screamed, as they strip-mined the economy, becoming the richest rich in the world’s history, even as they destroyed the basis of their power.

Soon they will be the rich of undeveloping countries; the rich of India in 1950. Scream at China as they will, nothing will change that they sold the golden geese to China for cash on the barrelhead and two generations of ephemeral wealth.

The Europeans, so smug and so sure of themselves after centuries at the top, as they fall back to being the meaningless backwater of Eurasia that is Europe’s normal state. “But we live in a Garden!” they will wail, as the garden fills with wheels and wrecked cars.

Satraps of their own colony, slaves to America, colonialists who killed hundreds of millions then screamed that their enemies were evil, not them, no, they were the good people, the civilized people.

This, God has granted me to see.

And then, all the capitalists, in all the countries, China, America, Japan, Russia, Europe, India: everywhere. “We can grow infinitely! We’ll always substitute! Technology will save us! We should engineer products for planned obsolescence! Wealth! Power! Infinity! We are geniuses! This is the best time every and we are the smartest smart people to ever smart!”

And it’s all coming down. Seems that infinite growth on a planet which isn’t infinite doesn’t work out. Seems that places to safely store pollution like CO2 and plastics aren’t infinite on a little green and blue planet. Seems like humans aren't independent of insects and plants and other animals and plankton: that we’re just one life form and if we kill too many of the others that may not work out for us.

God did not grant to me the power or the voice or the gifts necessary to prevent any of this evil.

But God has granted to me to see the end days of my enemies, and if they are my end days as well, still will I enjoy them.

May Bush, and Bill Clinton and Blair and Pelosi and Obama and Biden all live very long lives, with clear minds, that they might see all they created destroyed.

This God has granted to me, to see the destruction of my enemies and the fall of all they built.

I worked to prevent this, with all my might, and failed, as did all of us who fought against these evils. May what is born after be born of good, and learn from the fall of evil.

But still, I will enjoy what God has granted me.

Michaels: Problems vs Predicaments

How Intractable is Our Lack of Agency? Problems, Predicaments, and Technology by Erik Michaels. Jan 31, 2024.

One of my primary goals for the past several years has been (and continues to be) to try to bring about realization of the difference between a problem and a predicament. The reason is that most people tend to see our condition from a reductionist and/or siloed perspective, which is due to the social cultural conditioning, the indoctrination, and the propaganda techniques which form our belief systems. My last article went into some of this, but I want to bring back some articles from some time ago to demonstrate why our lack of agency befuddles us so much (see also this article) and combine them with some newer material just to present how intractable this all is.

I have discussed recently about why people worship technology so much and only tend to see the positive aspects of it and ignore the negative aspects. The cultural conditioning that accompanies civilization and modernity today incorporates a great deal of propaganda which tends to produce the wetiko that we suffer from. Building on what was presented in Fantasies, Myths, and Fairy Tales (link provided in above sentence), I add more information in my article about the MEER idea, proving once again that marketing, advertising, and propaganda are really the only hallmarks the idea is actually big on. With so many false beliefs and denial masking reality within society, how would we (if it was possible) ever bring about radical transformation voluntarily? As I have pointed out time and again, regardless of whether one is talking about the Degrowth Movement, or some version of electrification, or some other type of so-called "solution," these are all seriously thorny issues that are destined for the dust heap of noble ideas that just didn't work out.

The people who are busy promoting these ideas suffer a great deal from optimism bias and, unfortunately, denial of reality. Sure, these folks might be making a living off of marketing their idea, but is the actual idea behind the marketing effort going to provide the solution it is being marketed for? In a nutshell, NO. The trouble here once again is that we aren't suffering from a problem. We are suffering from a predicament; and predicaments have outcomes, not solutions.

I've spent some time in the past pointing out how idealistic plans for utopian societies or communities have all failed, one after another after another after another. Some communities that were established as utopian societies still exist, but these function either differently from how they were originally formed or had rather limited "utopian" qualities to begin with. The Transition Town movement was started to form a model of a more sustainable community, and it has gathered limited success, but these ideas again are based on civilization, which is unsustainable. I've brought up The Venus Project as well, which is destined for failure as well because of the idea it is based upon. Of the two ideas (The Venus Project and the Transition Town movement), the Transition Town movement would be the more sustainable one.

The biggest boondoggle within all of this is the web of propaganda, manipulation, cultural programming and conditioning, indoctrination, and belief systems which surround all of us. Our addiction to energy use and technology use prevents us from tackling precisely what would reduce ecological overshoot, and yet because of the belief systems surrounding us, few if any of us really want to reduce our energy use OR our use of technology. Human loss aversion has much to do with this as I pointed out in a recent article. Nate Hagens adds to these reasons with the Behavioral Stack, which goes into a considerable amount about how we tend to steer our thinking into left-brain thinking (reductionist), which breaks the world down into parts (separate entities) rather than seeing it holistically (interdependent and intertwined, as it actually is). It also describes how we spend most of our time in the dopamine-hijacked world. Most of us are more in a "me" state (all about me) versus a "we" state (all about us), which goes back to the wetiko state of thinking I mentioned earlier. Now, take all of this and add the biological imperative of the Maximum Power Principle, and what do we wind up with? If you answered, "Lack of agency," I think you would be correct.

Many people tend to think that society can reduce overshoot, and they would actually be correct if it was something that everyone wanted to do. However, when almost nobody truly wants to do that, what are the chances that it will ever happen voluntarily? Too many defense mechanisms exist to rationalize the situation and generate more convenient-sounding narratives, which lull people into a false sense of security that "somebody somewhere is working on it and will come up with a solution." AANNDDD, we're back to the whole "solutionista" thing again where I have to remind everyone that we face a predicament, not a problem.

Helping to heal trauma and promote natural togetherness and connectivity is something I think can also help to bring about awareness of wetiko and our other psychological crutches that tend to prevent complete comprehension of the situation we face. Still, we must face the simple facts implied by trauma and the illusion of separateness it facilitates. Even though I am aware of my own wetiko thinking, I don't always catch it at first - it flies under the radar and can be quite stealthy. It is entirely possible that we may never entirely bring awareness of wetiko and the psychological defense mechanisms we employ to the forefront of society or that even if we do, not everyone will be able to see it.

Speaking of being able to see it, many people don't realize precisely where we are as a species. To help bring a more complete sense of this for anyone who hasn't read many of my articles, let me bring up an article I wrote almost 3 years ago, What Will We Miss the Most? In this article, I highlight a video by Tad Patzek (queued up to the specific point in the video where he points out precisely what will happen to civilization - explaining the scenario revolving around the stepping down of civilization to 400 exajoules/year from 600 exajoules/year [rates of energy use]) and an article from Rob Mielcarski that really impressed upon me just how close we are to the point of mass realization of collapse. When I wrote the article, my understanding was that we were 5-8 years away from that point, which is now down to 2-5 years. Those of us who are aware of this can already see it; but unless one is actually looking for it, they will more likely get caught up in the distraction of propaganda, war, politics, etc., and the narratives they generate.

Perhaps one of the best ways to learn about our lack of agency is to point out the simple fact that climate change is irreversible on human timescales or that electricity is unsustainable and the grid will disintegrate this century or that civilization is unsustainable and ask people what they think should be done about it. Most of the responses you get will be complete nonsense based on a considerable amount of ignorance about the subject, but even cogent responses will run the gamut. (Almost) Nobody will suggest returning to the way humans did things before the dawn of agriculture, yet what if that ends up being the only option? With such a range of ideas, most of them unworkable and the remainder of them unfeasible socially and/or politically, how much agency do you think we actually have at changing who and what we are as a species or changing the system of the biosphere to bend to our will? Obviously, we've been trying to change the biosphere since we began using technology and it hasn't worked. Even after thousands of years, we still don't truly control nature. The only other option is to change ourselves.

Right now there are a wide range of response options, including bargaining to maintain civilization, which I expect a rather large portion of society to continue until it can't. But as many of the above links demonstrate, as time moves forward, these options will become fewer and fewer, taking many of the responses available today out of the mix. The likelihood that human society is going to suddenly "wake up" and act responsibly and ethically within the next 2 to 5 years is remote at best. Even if that were to happen, due to the aerosol masking effect (AME) issues I brought up in my last article, conditions would NOT get better as a result. As the outcome of that, I am pretty certain that things will continually worsen from here on out, with war one of the most predictable responses, given our history as a species. In my previous articles, you've seen what Art Berman has to say, you've seen what Tad Patzek has to say, you've seen what Vaclav Smil has to say, and you've seen what Nate Hagens has to say. Here's what The Honest Sorcerer has to say. After reading that article, here's one to follow it up with from Alice Friedemann.

For some folks, this is old hat and something we've known about for quite some time. For others, this might be absolutely devastating news. For those in the latter case, I highly recommend the Spirituality Resources File. I have written a few articles designed specifically to help, such as The Cycle of Life and Activities Which Can Help Us Deal With Climate Anxiety. Another article designed to help is Are You Running Towards Life or Running Away From Death? Whatever you do, Don't Postpone Joy. That is a big reminder to get out there and Live Now!