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!

Radagast: Your Future

Your Future. Rintrah, by Radagast. Jan. 30, 2024.

Propaganda is subtle, it appeals to the emotions. It generally doesn’t try to convince you with facts and logic. It’s the meandering sounds you hear, emanating from a speaker in the background as you wander through a shopping mall.

Most of the propaganda we’re fed, is this sensation, this feeling that tomorrow will look the same as yesterday, with some minor tweaks. But we’re already living through the collapse. This is what it looks like. In 2022, 6% of the population of the Central African Republic died. Most of them died of disease and hunger. The failing harvests cause migrations, which then cause conflicts. You’ll never hear about this on the news.

So what is the propaganda? The propaganda is this attempt at conveying a sense of normalcy to you. To keep doing what you’re doing. To continue business as usual. “Oh it’s a place you never heard of. It has always been politically unstable. It’s the Wagner group’s fault. It’s a brutal dictatorship.”

Everything that happens to you, is sold to you through propaganda as a choice you made. If you don’t have children, it’s not because you can’t afford to, it’s because you’re “queer”, so you choose to live with roommates into your thirties, in a giant metropolis. When I speak to these people, they don’t feel like an impoverished proletariat, that can’t afford to reproduce. They imagine themselves to be the upper middle class, whereas in Egypt or Syria, people in their situation would be participating in a bread riot.

And why wouldn’t they? The Dutch government departments fly their “progress flag”. Biden poses on the White House lawn with their flags behind him. This stuff was invented by some disabled anarchist, sure. But systems of control amplify messaging that fits their own objectives.

The propaganda we receive isn’t so much left wing or right wing. It’s a cultural force, that serves to stabilize society. Degrowth is ultimately the same phenomenon. It’s a cultural attempt, to rebrand something that’s already happening to us, as something we actually chose. Nobody is immune to propaganda. It’s not so much a technique to make us want what elites want. It’s to make us want what is inevitable.

I think a lot of the constant anger that right wingers feel could be addressed if they could just allow themselves to accept that the future is a lie. But they came up with their own brand of propaganda, which serves the exact same purpose, of convincing them that everything is normal. They imagine there to be a shadowy cabal of globalists, who teach them things are not normal.

Unprecedented droughts are normal, unprecedented heatwaves are normal, unprecedented downpours are normal. The lack of insects on your windshield is normal. And if you think it’s not normal, you were brainwashed by the old bald German man who sounds like a Nazi and wants to make us all eat bugs. That’s the emergent propaganda. It’s spontaneously produced, by people who don’t want to understand what’s going on.

It’s anesthesia, it’s a bag of ketamine handed out at a party. When you spend your afternoon, making your soyjack eat the bugs Klaus Schwab comic with the based Chad who says “Yes.” and post it to Twitter or 4chan, you’re the guy who brought the bag of ketamine to the party. You’re the one who helped us all forget, what we already know. In Brave New World, you don’t need the government to hand out Soma. You just need the government to look the other way, then people will do it themselves.

But reality is hard to accept. If you always knew at some level that none of this is normal, then you can gradually build upon it. Ten year old me knew it’s not normal that we put animals in cages and eat them for food. I didn’t yet know this breeds superviruses, antibiotic resistant bacteria and deforests the Amazon, but those are layers you can then stack on top.

But if you don’t figure it out at a young age, then you become forced to puncture a dam as an adult, that holds back a massive wave of water. That’s painful. My mind never built that dam. I always saw that it’s not normal. If you tell me the Panama canal no longer works because the droughts are causing a lack of fresh water, it fits neatly into what I already knew.

The problem is that the water is not going to stop rising. You can keep building your dam higher. Eventually you’ll be living in an alternative reality, you’ll become convinced that India is suffering HAARP induced droughts so that they will accept a Rothschild controlled central bank digital currency. But I don’t think that’s the path to inner peace. Once you can accept what’s happening, you can enjoy the time we have left.

Michaels: on maladaptive thinking

The Evolution of My Thinking. Erik Michaels at 
Problems, Predicaments, and Technology. Jan 24, 2024.


Before I get started, I would like to say that I would love to be wrong about all of this (subject matter contained within this article and my blog in general), but the empirical evidence is not pointing that way. I know that there are lots of people who want more to hope for, but I follow the evidence and where it leads, and I just don't see much room for hope and I still think that Derrick Jensen said it best here about hope. The main reason for this entry is to demonstrate the power of conditioning, indoctrination, and our beliefs, along with manipulative narrative generation within the framework of how we process and think about the predicaments we face.

The evolution of my thinking has undergone a rather huge shift over the last decade and a half. Before I watched Collapse with the late Michael Ruppert, I was your typical American cornucopian and had little knowledge of much of the predicaments I have learned about since then. Ruppert's documentary blasted open the doors of peak oil (energy and resource decline) for me and made me aware of the Limits to Growth and the precursor to ecological overshoot. While I had extensive knowledge about climate change and pollution loading, I was unaware of energy and resource decline and how it will affect us.

As with most people, life was roaring all around me, I was busy working on building my company, and spent my time not only on the weddings themselves, but actively volunteering in my community as well. Life was grand, and it still is, although quite a shift has taken place within me since those days of blissful ignorance. A short 3-4 years after watching Collapse, I discovered overshoot and NTHE. Finally, these predicaments slowly came into focus and I advanced from Stage 2 of Bodhi Paul Chefurka's Continuum of Awareness to Stage 5 over the next several years (see the Continuum of Awareness at the end of Why is Civilization Unsustainable?).

As countless others have done, based upon my new knowledge, I made plans and decisions that would affect me and the rest of my life from that point forward. Some of these plans were rather difficult to make because they represent sacrifice. They go against the grain, so to speak. Some folks just don't really get the fact that personal sacrifice and personal change are the ONLY way to help facilitate external change. Many people seem to think that the way to becoming more sustainable is to buy more "green, clean, renewable, and sustainable" products such as solar panels, EVs, and batteries. Buying products labeled with ANY of those terms changes nothing. More mining, energy use, and material throughput had to be facilitated in order to manufacture those products, no differently than the products they are replacing. If there wasn't anything truly wrong with what they were replaced with, the MORE sustainable choice would have been NOT to buy something new, regardless of what it is. Buying new products in an effort to reduce energy use and material throughput because the newer items are "more sustainable" is an illusory concept. By buying the new product, you are cancelling out any real benefit by continuing the same exact cycle of consumerism you are trying to stop.

I considered buying these types of products myself. After looking into options for a solar system, I concluded that the geographical area I live in is far from ideal for such a system and that solar systems work better in sunnier areas of the world. I also now realize that these systems cannot be maintained once the fossil fuel platform can no longer be maintained itself. Long before the fossil fuel platform can no longer be maintained, however, global supply chains will become problematic and what can be obtained from far away will take a very long time to arrive, if at all. Planning on having access only to local or regional resources is much more realistic. What good would a solar system do me when its realistic life cycle would only last until industrial civilization crashes? Since I already own generators and a power inverter and batteries, adding a solar system would be a massively expensive proposition which really wouldn't help much. Many people simply haven't done their homework to realize how frequently batteries, chargers, inverters, and solar panels degrade or become inoperable and how expensive these systems are to maintain. Add to all of this the inevitable decommissioning and junking/recycling of such materials after their effective life is over. Of course, recycling is yet another whole conversation, but let's just expose the fact that recycling is rather energy intensive and often requires many toxic chemicals, and one never gets the same amount of material out of recycling that one put in. As energy and resource decline continue, recycling will likewise become less and less available to the wider economy, which means more and more junk piling up in landfills - toxic junk. While this is a different conversation than the one I am currently discussing, go to this article for more details on pollution loading or see this file.

Back to this discussion, what the last paragraph demonstrates is that I decided that owning a solar system wouldn't be worth the cost as I couldn't recoup those expenses with the number of cloudy days we have here and the intermittent nature of the electrical supply to begin with (they only produce power when the sun is shining). Likewise, the same thought processes went into other items such as EVs and I came up with the same results - that these are expensive devices and they don't actually change anything we are doing within the system of civilization. In order to actually make a difference, NO car is the better answer by far (Steve Bull points out all the details in this article, so be sure to check all his footnotes). My regular bicycles that I already own are far better than a car for getting from point A to point B. Obviously, this isn't always possible, but there's really no reason to replace anything I have unless what I have is no longer working properly.

The other thing that most people aren't considering is how long the roads they drive on will continue to be maintained at their current rate and at their current quality. This is going to be seriously reduced in the coming years due to collapse, unfolding all around us. In fact, for those of you in the United States, our infrastructure is really in a sad state. For a better understanding of the infrastructural platforms that we depend on daily, check out this article. The system is generally much larger than most people assume and depends on more basic platforms which support the upper layers. Without the basic support structure intact and properly maintained, the upper layers cannot function correctly either. Due to constantly reducing EROEI levels (see this article on what surplus energy is), constantly and continuously reducing amounts of surplus energy will be available to power society.

Combine all these facts with the simple fact that the electrical grid is nowhere near ready to be able to supply the energy that all these EVs would require in the first place (if we were to replace ICE vehicles with EVs). It would be another generation at least before the grid was up to such a level and this is right around the time industrial civilization is expected to be finished. Perhaps a more valid reason NOT to buy an EV is the simple fact that the electrical grid itself is unsustainable and will not outlast industrial civilization, being the one of the weak links that brings the entire system down.

More often than not, many people choose to buy an EV in hopes of making a difference to emissions. Emissions is a symptom predicament of ecological overshoot and cannot be brought down by using more complex technology. The only way to reduce emissions is to reduce overshoot, and this requires less technology use, not more or more complex technology use. Art Berman points this out in his article about how climate change is a rather narrow view of overshoot here.

At the same time that many people hope to use different devices (EVs, solar panels, batteries, and other "clean, green, renewable, and sustainable" devices) instead of ones they already own, they are entirely missing that this doesn't really change anything within the system; they are merely bargaining to maintain civilization which CAN'T be maintained.

Comprehending all of this was difficult and like most people, I went through some serious grief with many periods of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression before reaching acceptance. Even after reaching acceptance I have caught myself going back through different phases of grief. I frequently use sarcasm as a way of coping with all of this, and it does help. But wait...it gets worse! Much worse...

Some people have the wisdom to see all of this and have embarked on projects to build resilience and regeneration through permaculture, planting trees, and/or regenerative agriculture. While this is helpful and a noble goal for people, it just won't be enough. Just like the Degrowth Movement or The Venus Project or even other versions of The Venus Project as I highlighted in my last article, these types of ideas require global unity which is not forthcoming. These types of ideas depend utterly on what amounts to wishful or magical thinking, and the reason I make this statement is because of one of the symptom predicaments of overshoot, climate change. Climate change is slowly but steadily gaining speed and strength and a large portion of the damage has already been done - it's in the rear-view mirror, folks. Discussing ideas about how to reduce emissions at this point is fine, but let's realize that climate change will NEVER get better during our lifetimes or even those of our grandchildren. I struggle with this myself because I hold no illusions in my mind about what the future looks like. Things aren't going to suddenly change most likely (unless a nuclear confrontation takes place), but conditions a decade from now are going to be much different from those today.

Too many people (keep in mind that this is my perspective) do not understand how these changes will affect them. To comprehend these things more fully, the late Will Steffen explained that it isn't just the changing climate so much as it is the rate of change that is so significant. However, even that is paled by the new paper that Hansen et. al. 2023 put out (Global warming in the pipeline). In this new video put out by Nate Hagens, Leon Simons explains the study along with the graphs used for the video where you can follow along as you listen. In order to fully appreciate these changes, it will be helpful to understand how warming affects agriculture and food security. It is further help to understand photosynthesis. Once one has those basics down pat, then one can also understand why almost any type of agriculture will become problematic at best and totally unworkable at worst. An additional set of information is available here in the Aerosol Particulates, Clouds, and Global Dimming file.

Yes, I have posted many of these links before, but it appears rather obvious to me that I need to repeat them as people tend to forget these things (even I do). Perhaps it is the conversations I have with people who fail to understand what it is I am trying to communicate to them because they don't bother to read the articles I post in my conversations, designed to help them understand what I am attempting to communicate. MOST of the information is contained in the articles, so if they don't even bother to read them and continue conversing with me, I am well aware of how well they understand (or lack thereof) the concepts I am trying to communicate. A considerable number of these people clearly don't really want to learn, unfortunately. Initially, this was something I wasn't quite prepared for. Now, I am unfortunately quite used to it. Each one of these conversations teaches me something. Some of them I am impressed with, but overwhelmingly most of them are depressing. Still, they inform me of where I can at least try to direct more information towards. As can be seen in the above paragraph, conditions are progressing pretty much as has been predicted in multiple studies over the past decade, and this should get people focused much more on using less technology, not more. Sadly, this isn't what I am seeing generally. There are a few people who wisely see what is needed with low tech or no tech, but much of society is still chasing more tech or more complex tech, taking us in the wrong direction.

What people need to be doing isn't prescribing technological devices as some sort of way to reduce their ecological footprint, but devising ways instead to change their lifestyles and habits to reflect a lower energy and material throughput future. One successful way to do this is to reduce your income. If you don't have the money to buy gadgets that aren't needed in the first place, you'll appreciate more fully the ones you have. For tools that need replacing, try purchasing hand tools or items that aren't powered by gasoline or electricity. This is the coming reality and one must accept it or suffer.

Needless to say, where I once looked for solutions to every problem I now look to see whether I am facing a problem with a solution or a predicament with an outcome. Predicaments can't be solved, so a response is the best that can be proffered. These responses should be tailored to the future we will be inhabiting, as developing ideas based on today's conditions won't necessarily be of any use tomorrow. EVs won't be of much use if the roads required for them can't be maintained properly. If you live in a desert area today, you may not have a water supply tomorrow. Photosynthesis may be unreliable in the future due to high temperatures, so depending entirely on agricultural crops might be a mistake. Building resilience and regenerative capacity means depending on less technology use, plain and simple. We must all get out of certain mindsets that lead us into trouble.

What I want to promulgate with this post is that most people don't appear to understand that what passes as the correct things to do in response to overshoot are frequently counterintuitive to what many think are the correct things. Buying products or using more technology or more complex technology is a maladaptive behavior and will not help to reduce overshoot. Looking for more efficient technology or items that use less energy or material throughput is a noble idea; but unless what is currently being used needs to be replaced, sticking with what one already has is more often than not a better choice since it has already been manufactured and is located where it needs to be (rather than halfway around the world). The obsession of looking for solutions needs to be replaced with looking for ways to help others. Reductionism and siloed thinking need to be replaced with good, old-fashioned community connectivity. The bottom line is that we are not going to solve anything - the best we can accomplish is to reduce the severity of the outcomes of the predicaments we are enmeshed within. We must come to our senses and realize that the entire human-built world is in the process of simplifying. An individual born today will see within his or her lifetime (IF he or she lives a typical lifetime of about 75 years) the ending of industrial civilization, cars, grid electricity, big box stores, most retail outlets, and many other things that today we take for granted. What I notice with regard to my thinking is that ultimately, my first thoughts (a decade ago) on how to tackle the predicaments we face was precisely the wrong way to go about making the outcomes better. From what I commonly see in groups and threads on certain topics, I can see the same maladaptive thinking at work causing many people to make the incorrect choices in their lives; bringing a reduction of resiliency and regeneration to the forefront rather than an increase. This can only happen if we are changing BOTH how the overall system operates AND our own behavior within that system. Switching to a different or more complex way to power cars or the electrical grid or civilization itself doesn't really change anything does it? No, the system itself is unsustainable, so how it is powered is almost totally irrelevant because it will never make it sustainable. Changing our behavior requires changing our thinking patterns away from wetiko, and this requires a sustained commitment to doing so. As I finished up this article, I came across this video from Nate Hagens which is surprisingly similar.

I understand that most people either aren't going to see these facts or will disagree with them because they don't want to see the facts or agree with them. This unfortunately does not change those facts. Until next time, Live Now!

Conway: The Hump

The Hump. Conway, The Material World. Dec 22, 2023.


Quite early on in Material World I wrote that :

pursuing our various environmental goals will, in the short and medium term, require considerably more materials to build the electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels needed to replace fossil fuels. The upshot is that in the coming decades we are likely to extract more metals from the earth’s surface than ever before.

The point being that while in the long run it’s quite possible that we reduce the size of humanity’s footprint on the planet, in the immediate future we will do a lot more exploiting. We will mine more, refine more and consume more stuff - and the stuff we need for the energy transition will only add to this material intensity. The footprint will grow.

So, how does one square this with a few interesting papers which seem, on the face of it, to be suggesting precisely the opposite thing? Among the most prominent was this recent paper by Joey Nijnens and others. The paper looks at the total amount of material requirements for the energy transition and compares them with our current fossil fuel use.

The charts underline an important point. We use an extraordinary amount of fossil fuels each year (far, far more than most people appreciate). And the main message from this chart is that while we’ll certainly need to do a lot of mining to get the copper, lithium, cobalt etc we’ll need, that weight of “new” stuff will be far less than the weight of all the fossil fuels we’re no longer using.

But the chart, which begins at around 2020, seems to suggest that this is happening now.

In other words, far from increasing in the short to medium term, as I wrote in my book, it looks tantalisingly as if humanity’s material footprint is actually about to fall immediately.

Hannah Ritchie did an excellent post a few weeks ago on that paper and another one making a similar point. As you’ll see from her chart (based on the data in the other paper, this one from Takuma Watari et al), the shape of the line is quite similar:

On the basis of all these charts it looks as if our mineral demand has already peaked, and that it will fall on a more or less constant basis in the coming years. Indeed, if we improve our ability to recycle then the line goes down even faster, so that by 2050 our apparent footprint has diminished considerably.

But is this really plausible? In other words, might things have improved so rapidly since I wrote those words above that I am already wrong - that far from growing, our footprint is about to shrink?

Unfortunately, the answer is no, for two reasons.

The first, and by far the most important, is that the charts above are based not on a realistic forecast for where our mineral consumption may actually head in the coming decades, but a very ambitious pathway we are already short of.

You see, the charts above are predicated on the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero Emissions (NZE) pathway.

Long story short, a couple of years ago the IEA produced an excellent report providing a roadmap for how we might be able to get to net zero across the world. Actually they provided three roadmaps: a very ambitious pathway which could actually get the world to net zero by 2050 (the NZE pathway), as well as two other routes - one based on “announced pledges” (APS) - what governments said they would do and “stated policies” (STEPS), which is, for want of a better phrase, “business as usual”.

You get a sense of the difference between these pathways when you look at the chart above, in which I’ve mapped out what each of these IEA pathways assumes about crude oil production. The net zero pathway involves a very quick fall in global oil production in the coming years. But the other two pathways see oil production fall far more slowly (and, by extension, we fail to keep global temperatures below the 1.5 degree threshold).

Now let’s look at where the IEA thinks, on the basis of its latest assessment of what’s actually happening in the oil market, production is and is likely to head in the coming years. I’ve added another line to the chart:

You probably already get the picture. Far from following the net zero pathway, we are already some way short of it. Actually it’s worse than that: oil consumption is likely to overshoot all of those pathways in the coming years.

This, by the way, is precisely the story told by another recent report, the UN Production Gap 2023 report, which compares some of these pathways with where it actually looks, based on what fossil fuel producers are doing, where we’re heading. Look at the difference between the red lines below and, well, pretty much all the other lines.

You see, on the basis of revealed preference - what fossil producers are actually doing as opposed to what the IEA and others would rather like them to do - those lines aren’t going down in the coming years. They are rising, and in the case of oil and gas they may be considerably higher in 2050 than they are today. Coal production also just hit a record high in 2023.

Now, I suspect and also rather hope that the reality turns out to be considerably lower than those red lines. But what this exercise does is to underline that far from falling in line with the IEA’s best case scenario, right now fossil fuel use is rising above even its worst case scenario.

So any papers looking at future minerals demand and basing it on the IEA’s net zero scenario must be regarded not as exercises in prediction but as interesting thought experiments. Which, in fairness to these papers, is precisely what they are. And they make an important point: that in due course the energy transition should be far less mineral-intensive than today’s fossil fuel era. But the timing implied by those charts is way off.

Now, it’s worth saying, in the supplementary material to their paper, Nijnens et al say that if the world followed the STEPS scenario (eg the IEA’s worst case scenario) then:

“The estimate for 2040 ROM coal and ore extraction in the STEPS scenario is 8470 Mt, a similar extraction to the 2021 NZE ROM coal and ore extraction calculated in this research.”

In other words (and bear in mind this is based on a scenario which we’re already overshooting), our footprint will increase and then plateau before it decreases. And that decrease won’t begin for a while. There will, in other words, be a hump.

Once we get over that hump, the footprint does indeed start to shrink as the dynamics mapped in these papers suggest. As I wrote in the book, squint a bit and you can envisage a future where:

The world will be a healthier, more productive place, with fewer deaths from pollution, and since we will mine far fewer fossil fuels than today, our footprint will genuinely have shrunk across the world.

And for further excellent infographics about the sheer difference in scale between fossil fuel mining and future mining for green energy infrastructure (including stuff like steel), there’s a great recent report from the Energy Transitions Commission. With charts like this one:

But while this might be the case in the future, it’s not going to be the case for quite some time.

And that hump, like it or not, is probably what we’re heading for in the coming years. Those charts at the top are, like the IEA’s net zero model, better thought of as wishful thinking.

That brings us to a broader point, one recently made by the excellent Rob West of Thunder Said Energy: it’s very important to distinguish between the many models of what could constitute a plausible pathway to net zero and the pathway we’re actually on. None of this is to deny that these models are useful guides to how we might be able to shift towards cleaner energy: but they’re what they are. They’re models.

Rob’s own models, while we’re at it, suggest there will indeed be a peak (or maybe better to call it a plateau) for our material consumption around 2030, mostly thanks to a fall in global coal consumption. But his chart - the one above - is very different indeed to the ones at the top. For one thing, it has that hump.

Anyway, all of this is before you consider the other proviso which has to be appended to the analysis in these papers, which is that they aren’t considering all of the materials.

As you’ll know if you’ve read the book or indeed some of my previous blogs, the majority of our planetary footprint isn’t metals or fossil fuels, but the sands and aggregates and stone we dig and blast out of the earth’s surface to provide us with construction materials. It’s concrete; it’s sand used for land reclamation; it’s the aggregates we use to pave our roads.

And frankly there’s little sign of our consumption of that kind of stuff falling any time soon.

It would have been nice to have ended 2023 by declaring that we had reached the point of “peak stuff” - as those charts at the top seem to imply. But the reality is very different.

Our mineral consumption isn’t about to fall. We’re heading for the hump.

Radagast re: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

I read The Techno-Optimist Manifesto so you don’t have to. Rintrah by Radagast. Dec 2, 2023


There’s a growing realization I have, that one of the main effects that wealth and technology have is their ability to shield the mind from reality. Opulence is an insulator. More than anything, opulence makes you feel invulnerable. In Uganda, men prey for rain. They understand that they are tied to their environment and its well-being.

This doesn’t really exist in the modern world. You don’t feel tied to your region. I would encourage you to ask people, why they live where they live. Ask someone: Why do you live in Rotterdam? Why do you live in St. Louis? Why do you live in Maastricht? Why do you live in Memphis? You’ll receive answers like:

“Well because I want to study engineering”

“Because I work at an auto manufacturing plant”

“Because my parents moved here”

I can almost guarantee you there’s one thing nobody will say: Because there’s a river. And yet that’s probably why you live where you live. All the answers you will give come back to that point. Your grandfather moved to Chicago to work at a steel mill? Oh cool. So why is the steel mill there? BECAUSE THERE’S A MASSIVE RIVER LEADING TO NEW ORLEANS, ALLOWING YOU TO SHIP HEAVY GOODS ACROSS THE COUNTRY AT A FRACTION OF THE COST OF TRANSPORTING THEM BY ROAD OR RAIL.

And everything else you’re doing, only exists by the grace of these industries. You don’t work at the steel mill in Chicago, but at a university in Chicago? Well congratulations, you’re even further removed from actual physical reality, making you even more blind.

If you see the coal brought in by boat, or the finished product leave by boat, you might at least once in your entire life remember why you live where you live. But if your job consists of explaining to a bunch of 18 year olds why everything is racist, sexist and/or homophobic, you are permanently protected from understanding how you ended up there. Your entire reality is social, so you end up understanding nothing.

A lot of people have this back to the land fantasy. It’s easy to discover this, when you point out how harmful SUVs are. You’ll discover numerous Americans who insist they need one, to drive back and forth to their permaculture farm somewhere in bumfuck nowhere. In reality, we would be better off with people moving “back to the water” instead of “back to the land”.

I think it is this isolation from the reality of nature, that makes it so difficult for most people to accept that environmental problems are real problems. You can get people in Uganda to understand that climate change is a real problem. You can’t get most Western men to understand it, because technology serves to completely insulate them from reality. When things go wrong, there’s supposed to always be a technological solution for them. The scariest idea to them, is the idea that there are just certain limits you’ll need to respect.

Because billionaires in the United States tend to get rich by embracing technological progress, they tend to feel personally attacked by the idea that technological progress is running into hard limits and is increasingly unable to make life better for the majority of our population. It’s similar to trying to explain the energy problem that Bitcoin has, to someone who became rich through Bitcoin.

There are some billionaires who seem at least somewhat aware of this problem. Ted Turner is notorious for warning about the overpopulation problem. Bill Gates is pretty worried too. He realizes it’s going to take a long time, to solve the climate problem. Hence he wants to block the sun, which angers low IQ low status white males, who would prefer to die in their mobile homes when their air conditioning stops working.

But others are less worried. Others are worried, about our worries. That includes Marc Andreessen. So before I start off reviewing the manifesto he wrote, I want to point out how Andreessen became rich. Andreessen has worked for tech companies for a long time, but in 2009 he founded Andreessen Horowitz with his longtime business partner Ben Horowitz. He started out investing in various software companies.

These companies, as you may know, can reach ridiculous valuations. What Andreessen Horowitz do, is that they enter bubbles before they form. This is why they’re so enthusiastic about cryptocurrency. They invested in Ripple, in Coinbase, in cryptokitties, even in various obscure cryptocurrencies. The advantage this has is that they’re then rewarded with tokens, which they’re legally allowed to dump onto low status white males who fall for these swindles, as these are not securities.

This is basically the Andreessen Horowitz strategy: Ignite a forest fire and then sell it as a heat generating machine. High status white males like Andreessen set up businesses that sell shovels and then they wait for low status white males to go dig for gold. But this business is coming to an end, as low status white males are now stuck with credit card debt and have no money left to buy fake shovels and fake Internet gold from high status white males like Andreessen.

You know the situation is dire, because in the past when you used to point out that these are all scams, a low status white male would immediately appear from thin air, who would argue that every cryptocurrency is a scam, except for his own variety of fake internet money. These days you don’t even really see those types anymore.

So these dudes are in trouble. They don’t make money by funding things that people use. They make their money by investing in things before the dumb herd is able to invest in them. They don’t really care what they invest in, as long as the dumb herd shows up afterwards. But that dumb herd is running out of money.

I think this is some important context to the manifesto. You have a billionaire who moves onto increasingly more speculative ventures, pouring money into them in anticipation of the LSWMs who will show up later to inflate the value of those ventures. I think this man is trying to convince himself that his investments still make the world a better place.

So now onto the manifesto. Starting out with the good, the manifesto makes me feel less cringe. It isn’t any better or worse than something I would write for this blog while home alone on a Friday night. Example:

We believe that we are, have been, and will always be the masters of technology, not mastered by technology. Victim mentality is a curse in every domain of life, including in our relationship with technology – both unnecessary and self-defeating. We are not victims, we are conquerors.

We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.

You can be a fifty-something year old billionaire and still just write like an angsty objectivist teenage boy.

We all know by now, that when someone writes a book to debunk an idea, it’s because she fears the idea is true. And similarly, when someone writes a manifesto, it’s intended to convince himself of an attitude towards life he no longer believes in. If Ted Kaczynski really believed life in his cabin in Montana was idyllic, he wouldn’t spend his days blowing people up and writing his manifesto.

Let us look at the Techno-Optimist Manifesto again. I had expected it to be somewhat nuanced, to incorporate and then reject the critiques of eternal growth many smart people with far less money have already offered. Consider:

We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well.

The European Union has reduction in energy use as one of its official goals, because we already know this can’t work. Energy is ultimately heat. When we use more energy, we warm up our environment. That’s one of the reasons cities are warmer than the countryside.

After about 400 years of perpetual growth in energy consumption at 2.3% a year, the Earth’s surface would reach boiling point. This is just basic stuff you would expect people to know, but he either doesn’t know it, or he’s just sticking his fingers in his ears like a toddler and going “LALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU”, because he goes on to say:

We believe energy need not expand to the detriment of the natural environment. We have the silver bullet for virtually unlimited zero-emissions energy today – nuclear fission. In 1973, President Richard Nixon called for Project Independence, the construction of 1,000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000, to achieve complete US energy independence. Nixon was right; we didn’t build the plants then, but we can now, anytime we decide we want to.

The mysterious thing about the techno-optimists is that whenever they see us not doing what they want to do, they assume it must be because we just don’t want it. They never think to themselves “well, perhaps it wasn’t possible after all”.

Consider the nuclear delirium, the insanity that right wingers are peddling now that they’re ever so slowly coming to terms with the fact that yes, we’re rapidly making most of the planet inhospitable to human civilization. Now they have a solution: The whole thing could work, if we simply built nuclear power plants!

This is not a new solution, mind you, nor is the delirious optimism new. In the 70’s the Dutch prime minister sold all our natural gas for pennies, because they assumed it would be worthless and left in the ground as we would soon all be using nuclear energy instead. Today we’re stuck with the hangover from the naive optimism of our parents and grandparents.

There isn’t really a place on Earth, where we see what these people want to have. Not in communist China, not in Japan, not in the former Soviet Union, not in the US of A, not in South Korea, not in Taiwan, there’s no place on Earth that runs on nuclear. The sole exception you could argue is France, but that country depends on the rest of Europe to export and import its electricity, because their reactors have to shut down in summer when the rivers get too warm.

The reason it didn’t happen of course is because you run into scaling problems everywhere. It takes time and experienced crews to build these reactors, the reactors themselves depend on rare minerals, you need special locations near a source of water, away from dense cities and not at risk of war or natural disasters and then eventually you need to figure out a location to dump the waste. The reason the United States didn’t build those 1,000 reactors before the year 2000 is because it can’t.

But the biggest problem, is a problem I already touched on at the start of this post: Water. Everything ultimately depends on water.

What does a nuclear reactor do? It releases heat by splitting atoms, which we then use to generate movement in water and thereby ultimately produce electricity. This releases huge amounts of new heat you’ll need to leave somewhere.

Humans feel very powerful and in control, when they split the atom. But what do you do with the heat that you produce? Where do you leave it? Well, for 95% of all nuclear power generated we decide to cool our reactors with water.

So, we dump that heat into our water supply. If you warm up the water next to your shore, you’re going to produce toxic algae blooms, because the water stops mixing properly and you reduce the influx of oxygen. That means the fish in that environment eat toxic algae, causing the build up of domoic acid. This causes brain damage. Take a look at this:

A rash of attacks by seals on humans in South Africa has been blamed on brain damage caused by diseased fish.

A “red tide” of toxic algae, boosted by climate change, has found its way into South Africa’s seal population through the fish they eat.

That’s caused a mass die-off of seals – but those that remain have become unusually aggressive.

Can nuclear energy reduce our CO2 emissions? Probably. But we want to reduce our CO2 emissions, because we want less heat in our environment. If we build nuclear energy power plants, we move from increasing global warming, to increasing local warming. That’s not better, that’s worse.

Around 95% of all nuclear power generation uses water as a coolant. There are alternatives, there are a handful of gas cooled nuclear reactors. But if you want to have a nuclear meltdown, the best way to achieve it is probably to use an obscure type of reactor with a coolant that just disappears into the atmosphere as soon as something breaks. And it’s inevitably more expensive too.

A nuclear power plant is allowed to dump water into our seas and our rivers, that is up to six degree warmer than the water it took in. Do you think I want to cause six degree of local warming in my local water, to reduce global warming by less than 0.01 degree Celsius? That is suicidal.

And more importantly it doesn’t work either. Nuclear energy is intermittent energy. When the local water gets too warm, you can’t dump your water back into the environment. Sweden had to shut down one of its nuclear reactors in the summer of 2018, because the water got too warm. Climate change has the nasty habit of making proposed climate change solutions obsolete.

If the water is getting too warm for Swedish nuclear reactors in 2018, what do you think will happen to Dutch nuclear reactors that we want to start building today, that won’t become operational in 2030? They will cease offering any electricity during summer at all!

But these people don’t want to hear this, because they’re invested in the myth of mankind mastering nature. Not the individual man making it through the merciless Alaskan winter or anything like that mind you. These are not genuine rugged individualists, they are collectivists at heart, like most people. The autists and schizoids, the natural individualists, are rare creatures indeed.

No, Mankind is going to master nature, colonize other planets without atmospheres and figure out some way not to die of space radiation while doing so. So in the Techno-Optimist Manifesto we find Andreessen arguing that “the ultimate mission of technology is to advance life both on Earth and in the stars”.

Note that these people are also never really interested in a consolation price. They don’t speak of building floating cities on the ocean. They don’t speak of colonizing Antarctica. They’re not interesting in building domed underwater cities on the bottom of the ocean floor.

These are all vastly more cost-effective and realistic scenarios than colonizing Mars, or worse, places outside our solar system. It something goes wrong, you can send assistance within hours, instead of months. You have an atmosphere protecting you from harmful radiation. There would be a meaningful economic purpose to pursue.

But nobody is volunteering for this. Nobody is volunteering to live in a city 4000 meter beneath sea level. Nobody is pushing governments to let them build a city in Antarctica. Even the simplest possible option, a floating city, has hardly anyone genuinely interested. When you have 10,000 people living on a floating city, that is self-sufficient in food production, you can begin to think about more ambitious projects.

Keep in mind, these are all opportunities that would have a realistic chance to achieve what the Mars colonization enthusiasts claim to pursue: Protect humanity from extinction. When by 2100, most of the world gets too hot for human survival from time to time, we will still be right in the middle of the release of various greenhouse gasses from natural ecosystems.

What would probably help humanity survive by then, is if we had functional cities in Antarctica, floating cities on the ocean that could be moved to the North Pole or deep underwater cities shielded against above-ground temperatures (and against nuclear fallout). Those would all increase our survival chances as a species. Oceanic cities near the North Pole would even have an additional benefit: They would repair our climate by reflecting sunlight.

Colonies on Mars don’t have any of these benefits. They would inevitably just be an economic drain on planet Earth, unless you think a colony of 400 settlers on Mars would just 3D print their own CT scanners, dialysis machines, the rare earth minerals that go into such machines, antibiotics, pesticides (assuming they don’t just keep importing all food), baby milk powder, tetanus vaccines, radioactive iodine when someone gets sick, birth control pills and anything else humans need eventually. We’re able to have our standard of living, because we live around billions of other people who can deliver us anything we need, most of it within hours.

The actual reason the richest man on the planet wants to colonize Mars of course, is because reality doesn’t matter anymore for making money, as we don’t live in a society that punishes failure. We reward people who show us an image of success. In such a society, you become rich by telling people what they want to hear. You package people’s hopes and dreams and sell them back to them at inflated prices.

The reason this annoys me so much is because there are a handful of people out there who do accept that limits to growth are real and are working on solutions that could allow us to have something resembling a future. These solutions are humble and the people who propose them don’t have loud mouths, so you never hear about them, while the billions continue to flow to guys like Andreessen and Musk, who promise you a future on Mars.

It’s possible to grow seaweed in the ocean, ship it to shore by sailboat, dry it on land, burn it in a thermal power plant and then sequester the CO2 underground. This is a way to sequester CO2. It’s also possible to mine olivine, disperse it on beaches and let the mineral sequester CO2 for us. It’s even possible to bring the air to very low temperatures, until you eventually have frozen CO2, which you can then bury somewhere. A plant built for this purpose on Antarctica would be most cost-effective.

But again, there’s no true interest in ambitious projects. There’s a crisis of meaning, which people like Musk and Andreessen jump into with increasingly ridiculous ideas and visions for the future.

To a large degree, Andreessen’s success can be traced to him saying “Fuck ESG”. In the manifesto he makes this explicit. He writes:

Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.

If everyone else managing large sums of money is worried about making sure they don’t make the planet uninhabitable while adding another zero, but you decide not to worry about that, you have a strategic advantage. But when you use that strategic advantage, you want to justify it to yourself.

And so, you come to believe in “overcoming nature”, rather than in respecting nature’s boundaries. This doesn’t work. It just makes the eventual terms of surrender worse. If people had understood this simple principle, they would not have done something so stupid as attempting to vaccinate the whole world against a rapidly mutating SARS virus either.

But sadly, the Andreessens of this world don’t understand this. This means they are setting mankind up for just one possible outcome: Unconditional surrender.

Am I an Alarmist?

Am I an Alarmist? "Sarah Connor", Collapse 2050.

Maybe I'm the one that's a fool. Do these people know something I don't know? Am I wrong to think human civilization is circling the drain?


I never share my articles on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a circle-jerk of blind corporate optimism and virtue signaling. Between pointless meetings, political finagling and pseudo-intellectualism, there's no way these corporate vine-swingers want to hear that their very reason for existing is soon coming to an end.

Despite superficialities, many of these people are actually quite smart. But perhaps not smart enough to redirect their energy to something useful.

Who knows. Maybe I'm the one that's a fool. Do these people know something I don't know? Am I wrong to think human civilization is circling the drain?

Or, perhaps my assessment of the problem is correct but the techno-optimists are right that we'll eventually be saved by human ingenuity.

I wonder if I'm an alarmist.

I've always been this way. I picked up my anxiety from experience and my family. When was a small child I worried about war, destitution and the cruel world. As my consciousness matured during the height of the cold war, I fully expected to get nuked at any moment. That eventually wound down, but my existential angst violently resurfaced in 2001 when I learned about peak oil and the Olduvai Theory.

Meanwhile, the world was getting peppered with financial and medical calamities. Is it any wonder why I peer around the corner for the next disaster?

Yet, there are many others that are optimistic about the future and human ingenuity. Some even believe developments in AI will thrust humanity to a new era of abundance.

I wonder if I'm projecting my own anxieties onto my outlook for humanity. After all, there are plenty of other people who are equally convinced that I'm wrong.

Here's the thing. If I'm wrong, that would be the best possible outcome. I hope I'm wrong about our dystopian future. Just as I hope I don't crash next time I ride in a car.

Did you know: For every 1000 miles you drive, your chances of getting into a car accident are 1 in 366. That's lower than 1%, yet that doesn't stop me from wearing my seatbelt. I think most people do the same. However, decades ago it was considered alarmist to suggest people wear seatbelts. It became a debate over freedom. Some even argued it was safer to get thrown from a car during an accident.

If one feels the need to prepare for a car crash it certainly makes sense to prepare for crop failures, mass migration and broken supply chains.

Let's say there's only a 1% chance human civilization is wiped out. Even with such a low probability, the downside remains too great to ignore the possibility. People must prepare. I pulled the alarm, not because I'm an alarmist but because I want to warn people of what might be coming. If more people were alarmed, we might actually do something about it, reducing the cause for alarm in the first place.

With that said, I think the probability of civilizational collapse is much greater than 1%. There's a near certainty of collapse.

I've seen the research. Watched the trends. I've even observed the changes first-hand. The implications of a hotter climate - heat deaths, lower crop yields, rising seas - are obvious. The greenhouse effect has been known for about 200 years. Exxon itself forecasted everything we're seeing.

The big question is when and how?

Still, I must leave room for the possibility I'm missing something. Or that I'm underestimating human ingenuity, adaptability and technological advancement.

However, if I look at the evidence laid out in front of me, my predictions are well-supported by observable facts. Meanwhile, the counter argument is founded on unproven technologies and the crude extrapolation that civilization will continue to exist because it currently exists. The optimistic view is built on survivorship bias.

Unfortunately, the ghosts of failed past civilizations don't get a voice. If they did, there'd be a lot more alarmists.

Too Late for 2!

Provisional ERA5 global temperature for 17th November from @CopernicusECMWF was 1.17°C above 1991-2020 - the warmest on record.

Our best estimate is that this was the first day when global temperature was more than 2°C above 1850-1900 (or pre-industrial) levels, at 2.06°C. pic.twitter.com/jXF8oRZeip

— Dr Sam Burgess 🌍🌡🛰 (@OceanTerra) November 19, 2023

...

Breaking News!

Well humanity, we did it, even if just for one day. Yesterday, Nov. 18, was the first time in recorded history that the global 2m surface temperature breached 2.0°C above the 1850-1900 IPCC baseline.

The long-term average remains below 1.5°C. But not for long. pic.twitter.com/FGdQJP81FM

— Prof. Eliot Jacobson (@EliotJacobson) November 19, 2023

...

🌎🌡📈

ΔT +2.06 °C !!

This is what uncharted territory looks like.

The first time that the global temperature anomaly has broken through +2.0 °C, for a single day in observational history.

Much more to come in the months ahead. https://t.co/58ZjQzpM0s pic.twitter.com/Kp85epOjP3

— Leon Simons (@LeonSimons8) November 19, 2023

Rintrah by Radagast: Deus Ex Machina

Deus Ex Machina

I just think this is worth emphasizing again for me: There are not really any plausible scenarios left by now that result in our society fixing its problems on its own through voluntary means.

I’m not referring to any specific problem here, I’m referring to what Guillaume Faye called the convergence of catastrophes. Just as you have to be pretty dense to look at the Hamas demonstration in every major American and Western European city and think “we’ll make it”, you have to be pretty dense to look at the Canadian forests dying in unprecedented forest fires and think “this will work itself out”.

There’s not some scenario where a bunch of people block the road and governments decide “well I guess you’re right, it’s kind of insane that it’s cheaper to fly from Holland to Portugal than to take a train from Eindhoven to Amsterdam” and subsequently solve the climate crisis.

They’re not going to solve it and the reason they’re not going to solve it is because you have perhaps 2 or 3% of the population who are willing to do what it takes to solve it. Forget about the whole China and India question for a moment. Imagine if every government on the planet agreed to these three conditions:

1. Nobody is allowed to fly anymore.
2. People under 65 are not allowed to heat their homes to more than 15 degree Celsius.
3. Nobody is allowed to eat meat.

What would happen? The people would riot. Nobody genuinely wants any of this.

It doesn’t matter what China is doing, because if China subjected its citizens to some North Korean style regime and they were sitting in the dark and eating rats, you people would still reject doing what’s necessary to solve this crisis. So don’t give me the China story.

People want some technological fix to be implemented that doesn’t exist. So frankly, people deserve to die. And keep in mind, these are just three simple conditions. You could add that except for people in wheelchairs, nobody should be allowed to privately own a car, a ban on cryptocurrency mining, a ban on buying new clothing, a two child policy for sub-Saharan Africa, etc.

But what about nuclear? Well if you could snap your fingers and give every single country on the planet, including third world hellholes like Saudi Arabia and South Sudan, zero carbon nuclear power overnight, you would have solved 20% of the problem. Because 80% of our energy use is not even electric! It’s mostly thermal energy for stuff like melting aluminum and producing fertilizer.

See there’s the thing, for most of my life low status white males have denied this problem is even real. And now that the shit is hitting the fan, now that the ecosystems are dying and the farmland is becoming unworkable from the tropical storms, they’re saying: “Alright I guess it’s real, let’s implement $TECHNOFIX”. Sorry, that’s not how it works. You didn’t solve it, so you die. You’re like the idiot who wants to start exercising when his doctor tells him he has heart failure. .........

And my experience is that most people are just hopelessly naive, when it comes to problems that don’t fit neatly into their own biases about the world. .....

Welsh: State of the World 2023 #2

 Climate Change and Environmental Collapse (State of the World 2023 #2). Ian Welsh. November 02, 2023 

(This is second in the series promised during the 2022 fundraiser. For #1 (imperial collapse) read here.)

I’m going to keep this one brief.

This year has seen the constant shattering of temperature records. Temperatures in the high thirties, in winter, have been common.

The majority of the Mediterranean is going to be uninhabitable without air conditioning for months every year. This includes North Africa and the European areas. The same will be true of most areas of the tropics. Time scale is ten to fifteen years.

Because climate change includes weather instability, it will become impossible to get property insurance in increasing areas, starting with the coasts and areas prone to wildfires.

Wildfires will continue until the ecology of areas has changed to one suitable to their new temperature and rainfall pattern.

In the short to mid term, there will be a lot of river floods, then rivers based on snow pack or coming from glaciers will reduce in size or dry up. Most of the world’s aquifers are drained, and many are poisoned. This means vast areas will become unsuitable for agriculture, which will lead to genuine food shortages. We haven’t had those in a long time, our current shortages are because we can’t be bothered to distribute food, of which we have great excess. But by 2030 we’ll see some real famines, and by 2040 almost everyone’s going to be eating less, even if they aren’t going hungry.

The oceans will become increasingly lifeless, and most fisheries will collapse. Even sea farming will be difficult, as oxygen content drops and acidification increases. If you’re middle aged, you’ll see the start of the Sea of Jellyfish. The real danger is if CO2 fixing and O2 emitting plankton collapse, in which case we’ll see some real problems.

On land, the great rainforests will mostly die. This includes the Amazon and Congo. They will be replaced by wastelands, and will be almost impossible to regrow under the new circumstances. This will, again, lead to vast increases in CO2. The effect on Brazil will be catastrophic.

The first ocean inundations will come sooner than almost anyone thinks and low lying countries and areas which have not built sea walls and pumps will go underwater. Bangladesh is a good weather vane here, but the northern Chinese breadbasket is at risk in the second wave.

If this was only about CO2 and global warming the realist optimist types would be right that it’d suck mightily, but whatever. The danger is that we’ve also got ecological collapse going on. I can’t estimate the odds correctly, but collapse of food chains, and in particular collapses of microbes, insects, plankton and so on could lead to drastic issues. The old line is that if the bees go extinct, so do we, but there’s a lot more risk than that, and that’s the “apocalyptic” scenario.

In your personal life, you should be preparing. Find a way to get your own water, even if it’s condensation. Food is important but understand that growing it outside is going to be tricky because of climate instability. Food you can count on will have some form of environmental control.

Expect everything to come in faster than the consensus ICC estimates. They’ve almost all been wrong to the upside, so consider them the “best case scenario” and don’t plan for that.

Climate change and ecological collapse are going to play into geopolitics in a big way. Normally, as I wrote yesterday, the ascendance of China would be all over except the shooting, but China’s going to get hit hard. They’re not stupid, and they know this. They just penned an absolutely massive deal for food from Russia, for example. But they need to do a lot more, and they and everyone else are going to have to change lifestyles. An economy of millions of cars, with sprawling cities makes no damn sense if the future that is coming.

Refugee waves are going to be absolutely massive, with hundreds of millions of people on the move. Multiple countries will collapse into warlordism and anarchy. There will be real revolutions, with elites murdered en-masse, because when people start starving and going without water, they will freak.

There just isn’t going to be enough to go around, it’s that simple.

If you want to survive, beyond the obvious, make friends and join or create strong community groups. You want a lot of people to like you and want you to live. Find a way to be useful, if possible, too. Plumbers and handymen and makers will be taken care of.

This is still some ways off, but understand clearly, civilization collapse has started, we are past the peak and past the point where we can stop it with any actions which it is even slightly conceivable we are capable of taking politically.