Bardi: The Day When Food Ran Out

The Day When Food Ran Out. Ugo Bardi. June 19, 2024.

This is a science fiction story. Nothing in it refers to the real world unless you want to think it does.

As a Western citizen, you never thought you could have a problem with food scarcity. Not at all; famines are things of the past; they are about medieval peasants scratching the ground with wooden plows, about farmers exterminated by communists in the Soviet Union, about religious fanatics praying for rain. Things that others have to worry about; that mass of dark-skinned people who wear kaftans and turbans, who hate Western freedom and abundance. Those wretches who refuse to accept the rules of liberal democracy. They are those likely to experience famines.

For you, instead, the preoccupation with food is that you have too much of it and you are overweight. You have to diet, even though no matter what you do, you seem to keep gaining weight. But such is the price of prosperity.

Yet, not everything is well in the best of words. You may have noticed something was wrong when the COVID scourge swept the land. At that time, all of a sudden, everything that looked normal changed into something you wouldn’t have imagined before. A new normal, where the government locked you inside your home, forced you to wear a face mask, told you where you could go and where you couldn’t, what exact distance you should maintain from your fellow human beings, and more. Fortunately, Western science found a solution with advanced vaccines, and now the COVID-19 plague is a thing of the past. At least, this is what everyone says, although sometimes, you wonder whether it is true. You tried discussing that on social media, but you were told your post went against the community rules.

Yet, the COVID-19 story tells you that crossing from complacency to panic takes very little. And something ominous is mounting. You noted that the cost of food was increasing, but so far, that was nothing more than a minor inconvenience. As a Middle-Class Westerner, food never was a large fraction of your budget. The increase in food prices just made a dent in your disposable income.

But food prices keep rising. And they are now large enough that you can’t avoid noticing the effects. It is not just your disposable income that’s being affected. You have to cut on some foods you used to be able to afford. Less meat, for instance. Then, you discover you can’t afford the fancy foods labeled “natural” and “additive-free.” The Sunday trip to the restaurant with your family suddenly seems to have become something of the past. Too expensive. You also notice that many restaurants are closing, especially those fast food joints that once offered cheap food that even the poor could afford.

Your checking account now goes into the red by the end of the month. You have to be careful while you wait for your next paycheck to come. You have to buy smaller packages; a pint of milk, rather than a quarter gallon. It is not that you go hungry during the last days of the month, but you have to be careful.

Then, your credit card won’t let you get more into the red, and during the last days of the month you just can’t buy anything. Those days, the kids are whining that they are hungry and there is nothing they like in the refrigerator. Not even anything you like. A dinner on stale bread only? It is the best you can do on some days. You try to discuss this matter on social media, but you are told that your post goes against the community rules and is erased.

Then, the switch occurs. Food scarcity ceases to be a background problem that everyone tends to ignore. It suddenly becomes the centerpiece of the daily news. Words such as “famine,” “denutrition,” and “starvation” are no longer taboo. The government spokespeople openly say that drastic measures are necessary to fight the new threat to Westerners’ well-being. It is caused by evil foreigners who hate our freedom, and so they make it difficult to supply food to our great nation. However, the government is working hard to solve the problem by increasing military spending and developing new genetically modified food. We have to trust science. A solution will be found soon.

The government enacts a series of measures that look eerily similar to the “Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions” of COVID-19. You are not forced to wear a mask this time, but you must stay home. You have to “save calories” as much as you can. Exercising by running in the streets is forbidden. Gyms are closed by government decrees. Schools are also closed — it is a way to save calories. Your office tells you that they are closing down for a while. You’ll still receive your paycheck, but you will work only by telepresence. Using your car is not forbidden, but the government forces gas stations to close. We need to save gas for our military, you are told. You can keep the gasoline you have in your gas tank, but you can use it only for emergencies.

Food stamps were once only for the poor, but now everyone has them in the form of an electronic card called a “Green Card.” It gives you a limited allowance of bread, biscuits, vegetables, fruit, and a little meat for 2000 calories per day. It is not forbidden to buy food beyond your allowance, but prices are rapidly skyrocketing, and supermarkets now store the “extra” food on partially covered shelves so high to be difficult to reach, just like once it was done for porn magazines. A black market for forbidden food appears. Shady figures appear on the streets, selling t-bone steaks and pastrami at high prices.

The government cracks down on wasteful food, mainly meat. Restaurants reduce their menus to a few items, and many simply close. It is said that fancy restaurants are still open for the rich, but they do not advertise, nor are they visible from the street. You have to ring a bell to enter. You heard that from your neighbor, with whom you can still chat over the fence. But if you try to mention that on social media, your post is blocked, and you are told it is against the community standards.

The government enforces stiff penalties on the black market of food. Eventually, a drastic decision is made: cash is abolished, and all monetary transactions are allowed only using one’s green card. The government gives 48 hours to people to convert the cash they keep at home into an allowed electronic form at a bank, with the proviso that no more than $1000 can be converted in each transaction. Long lines are seen in front of banks, with people desperately trying to save at least some of their cash. Your neighbor tells you over the fence that, while standing in line, he saw people collapsing because of exhaustion and stress. Fortunately, you didn’t have that much cash at home. But you are told by your bank that from now on, you won’t be able to spend more than 50 dollars per day. And they also tell you, confidentially, that if you do that every day for a long time, there could be consequences. These stories are not reported in the media, and if you try to discuss the matter on social media, you are told that your post goes against the community standards and it is erased.

Next, the government cracks down on food hoarding. “Prepping” becomes a bad word. The police can now enter your home anytime to check what you have in your kitchen and refrigerator. Those preppers who keep more than their allowance are designated as “enemies of the people,” punished by stiff penalties, including disabling their green card for a certain period. During that period, they can’t buy anything anywhere. It is said that many preppers die of malnutrition or kill themselves because of depression. Some are said to have exchanged their family jewels for a sandwich. If you mention that on social media, you are told it goes against the community standards.

The new-new normal is firmly in place. It is accompanied by slogans such as “don’t starve granny,” “trust science,” and “together we’ll make it.” The times are especially tough on the elderly. Your neighbor over the fence tells you that he heard from a neighbor that there was an old couple in a home not far away. They died of starvation together in their bed, and they were discovered only when the stench of their decomposing bodies became impossible to ignore. The media doesn’t mention anything like that, and it is against community standards to say that on social media.

The government announces promising new discoveries in the field of GM food. The war overseas is in full swing and surely victory is just behind the corner. More than once, you see from your window armored columns of tanks and trucks passing on the street. Where they are going, what they are doing, you cannot say.

You are still allowed a daily trip to the mall to stock up in the food you can buy with your Green Card. There, the supermarkets now act only as distribution centers for green card holders, at least those that remain open. You stop going there using your car: you have to save gas. Instead, you laboriously push a supermarket cart all the way home. Those carts have become rare. People don’t have gasoline anymore, and they use them in place of cars.

In your trips to the mall, you note that the quality and amount of food your green card can provide seems to be decreasing daily. Shops selling food have disappeared, and restaurants, too. Maybe there are still some open for the rich behind closed doors. But you cannot know, and if you try to ask the question on social media, you are told that your post goes against the community standards. Coffee shops are still open, and they sell you a black liquid that tastes like coffee but doesn’t give you any more the kick that it once did. Your green card will buy one cup, and it comes with a single sugar packet — sometimes they will give you two; a little miracle. Outside the shop, you often see young women standing. They are giving themselves to strangers for one sugar packet. Those who are especially good-looking want to have two. But you need that sugar to give you that little extra bit of energy you need to push the cart all the way home.

At home, the children are whining all the time. They don’t go to school anymore, and they seem to spend most of their time in their room, watching cartoons on TV. You do the same, slouched on the sofa in the living room. Discussions about the war and about Genetically Modified Organisms have now completely taken over the time slots on TV that once were used for advertising. The war is going well, our troops are winning. The enemy are still fighting, but victory is at hand, and then the world will be different. About GMOs, large amounts of money are given to the pharmaceutical industry to develop new methods of modification of the genome of plants in order to create more productive crops. They are said to be obtaining spectacular results that will soon be implemented in the form of food for the people. It is now called “'One Food Policy.' Doubting that goes against the community standards.

Looking out from your window, sometimes you see people running in the street, chased by policemen wearing body armor. More than once, you heard shots being fired not far away, but you understand that it would not be a good idea for you to investigate in person. In TV, you hear that any form of riot will be rapidly quelled by the army – if it ever happens. Discussing these matters goes against the community standard.

And then the day comes: the government announces on TV that the “One Food Policy' bore fruit. The GMO foods are ready. The news is all over the TV channels and the press. Images show trucks carrying boxes and boxes of the new foods, and the most exciting news is that they will be distributed for free. No need for your green card, just show up at the distribution centers, and you will have GM food for your family. GM foods are good, they are nutricious, they are what you need to return to the normal world.

People crowd again in front of the distribution centers; those who still have gas come with their cars, many come pushing old supermarket carts, others simply with empty plastic bags. The lines don’t seem as long as they could have been, since so few of these centers are left. And they move fast. People emerge from the shops with boxes labeled with the “GM” letters written in bright green characters. They load them in their cars or in the supermarket carts, or carry them home in the bags.

You push your cart all the way home and open the boxes. GM food comes in the form of solid bars, slightly sweet, with a curious aftertaste. There are also small plastic containers of a sauce that vaguely reminds the old barbecue sauce - a little of a strange aftertaste, too. There are also cans labeled as “GM cola.” Very sweet stuff, again with that weird aftertaste. But better than tap water, recently it didn’t smell so good.

The kids are happy. They had been abulic, doing nothing but watching TV, and they had become thin and even a little gaunt. Now, they can eat to their satisfaction. And they say on TV that schools will soon be reopened.

Certainly, you can’t expect from GM foods the same quality you had before the crisis. A vague sensation that what you eat is not exactly good for you. But saying that on social media would go against the community standards.

Days go by. You get more GM food from the supermarket, and you eat it with your family. You feel satiated but a a little tired. You notice that for days, you have been doing nothing but watching TV while slouched on the sofa. The office should reopen someday, just like the schools. But nothing is happening. There is nothing to do but eat those strange GM bars and watch TV.

You decide to take a walk. You know that walking is not encouraged: it wastes calories. But now that you have GM food, maybe you can try. You need to walk, you have spent too much time sitting on the sofa.

You emerge into the street. The quiet is eerie. Nobody is walking. An armored car passes by, running fast. It has darkened windows.

The silence is disquieting. Where is everybody? On the sidewalk, half hidden behind a bush, you see something. It is a body lying flat. It is your neighbor, you recognize him. He has his mouth open, his vitreous eyes looking at the sky. The body has a curious gray color and it smells of something that you can’t exactly identify. Something that’s a little like. . . a little like. . .

You turn around. You have to go home. You want to walk fast but, strangely, you feel exhausted. Every step takes an incredible effort. Strange, you are not so old to need a deambulator. And, yet, you have the sensation that walking without one is nearly impossible.

You manage to get back home. Even walking the two steps to the entrance door seems to require a superhuman effort. You get inside. Silence is total; where are the kids? Where is your wife? You don’t know, but you don’t really care. You pass in front of the mirror of the living room. You look strange, and you hadn’t noticed that your skin had taken that weird shade of gray.

You stumble onward until you fall heavily on the sofa. The TV is off—no, it is on. You push the buttons on the remote control, but nothing appears on the screen. All the channels show only noise, and the audio is just a faint hiss. What’s happening?

You suspect that asking that question would be against the community standard. But you don’t care. You lie flat on the sofa, looking at the ceiling. Your sight is blurred; a certain grayness invades your field of view. Gray, all is gray. Darker and darker. And then, black.

Dowd: Being the Calm in the Storm

Being the Calm in the Storm.  Michael Dowd, 2023.

The Collapse is Coming

The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt? Peter Watts, The MIT Press Reader.
An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar... and mull over survival.


I’ve known Dan Brooks for 40 years now. Somehow we’re still talking to each other.

We’ve followed radically different trajectories since first meeting back in the ’80s. Dan built a truly impressive rap sheet of over 400 papers and book chapters, seven books, and too many awards, fellowships, and distinctions to count on your fingers and toes. I, in contrast, left academia in a huff (industry funding came with, shall we say, certain a priori preferences concerning the sort of results we’d be reporting) and became a science fiction writer. It’s a position from which, ironically, I’ve had more influence on actual scientists than I ever did as an academic — admittedly a low bar to clear.

And yet our paths continue to intersect. Dan offered me a post-doc in his lab around the turn of the century (DNA barcoding — I really, really sucked at it). A few years later I helped him relocate to Nebraska, leading to an encounter with the armed capuchins of the U.S. Border Patrol and eventual banishment from that crumbling empire. The protagonist of my novel “Echopraxia” is a parasitologist suspiciously named Daniel Brüks. And I once ended up one creepy handshake away from Viktor Orbán, when Dan finagled a speaking gig for me at Hungary’s iASK Symposium.

The dance continues. Sometimes we hug like brothers. Sometimes we feel like punching each other’s lights out (also, I suppose, like brothers). But one thing we never do is bore each other — and whenever Dan’s in town, we manage to meet up at a pub somewhere to reconnect. What follows is an edited record of one such meeting, more formal than most, which took place shortly after the publication of “A Darwinian Survival Guide.”


The following conversation was recorded in March 2024. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Peter Watts: In this corner, the biosphere. We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050.

In response to all of this, the last COP was held in a petrostate and was presided over by the CEO of an oil company; the next COP is pretty much the same thing. We’re headed for the cliff, and not only have we not hit the brakes yet, we still have our foot on the gas.

In that corner: Dan Brooks and Sal Agosta, with a Darwinian survival guide. So, take it away, Dan. Guide us to survival. What’s the strategy?

Daniel Brooks: Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

“Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work.”

Stepping back a bit. Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didn’t want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, “It’s OK; I can fix Darwinism.” This guy’s name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, “I can fix Darwinism. We’ll just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of what’s-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, we’re going to call it survival of the fittest, and it’s whatever is best now.” Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from “evolution is long-term survival” to “evolution is short-term adaptation.” And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.

Well, fast-forward and how’s that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencer’s ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwin’s ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwin’s original message, we not only find an explanation for why we’re in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.

To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive.

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours. So we have to understand that we’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence. And so, if there is the kind of nature collapse that the Melbourne Sustainable Studies Institute is talking about, how are those people going to survive? A completely dispassionate view would just say, “Well, you know, most of them won’t. Most of them are going to die.” But what if it turns out that we think that embedded within all of that technologically dependent society there are some good things? What if we think that there are elements of that existence that are worth trying to save, from high technology to high art to modern medicine? In my particular case, without modern medical knowledge, I would have died when I was just 21 years old of a burst appendix. If I had managed to survive that, I would have died in my late 50s from an enlarged prostate. These are things most would prefer not to happen. What can we begin doing now that will increase the chances that those elements of technologically-dependent humanity will survive a general collapse, if that happens as a result of our unwillingness to begin to do anything effective with respect to climate change and human existence?

Peter Watts: So to be clear, you’re not talking about forestalling the collapse —

Daniel Brooks: No.

Peter Watts: — you’re talking about passing through that bottleneck and coming out the other side with some semblance of what we value intact.

Daniel Brooks: Yeah, that’s right. It is conceivable that if all of humanity suddenly decided to change its behavior, right now, we would emerge after 2050 with most everything intact, and we would be “OK.” We don’t think that’s realistic. It is a possibility, but we don’t think that’s a realistic possibility. We think that, in fact, most of humanity is committed to business as usual, and that’s what we’re really talking about: What can we begin doing now to try to shorten the period of time after the collapse, before we “recover”? In other words — and this is in analogy with Asimov’s Foundation trilogy — if we do nothing, there’s going to be a collapse and it’ll take 30,000 years for the galaxy to recover. But if we start doing things now, then it maybe only takes 1,000 years to recover. So using that analogy, what can some human beings start to do now that would shorten the period of time necessary to recover? Could we, in fact, recover within a generation? Could we be without a global internet for 20 years, but within 20 years, could we have a global internet back again?

Peter Watts: Are you basically talking about the sociological equivalent of the Norwegian Seed Bank, for example?

Daniel Brooks: That’s actually a really good analogy to use, because of course, as you probably know, the temperatures around the Norwegian Seed Bank are so high now that the Seed Bank itself is in some jeopardy of survival. The place where it is was chosen because it was thought that it was going to be cold forever, and everything would be fine, and you could store all these seeds now. And now all the area around it is melting, and this whole thing is in jeopardy. This is a really good example of letting engineers and physicists be in charge of the construction process, rather than biologists. Biologists understand that conditions never stay the same; engineers engineer things for, this is the way things are, this is the way things are always going to be. Physicists are always looking for some sort of general law of in perpetuity, and biologists are never under any illusions about this. Biologists understand that things are always going to change.

Peter Watts: Well, that said, that’s kind of a repeated underlying foundation of the book, which is that evolutionary strategies are our best bet for dealing with stressors. And by definition, that implies that the system changes. Life will find a way, but it won’t necessarily include the right whales and the monarch butterflies.

Daniel Brooks: Right, right. Yeah.

Peter Watts: And you take on quite explicitly the neo-protectionists, who basically want to preserve the system as it exists, or as it existed at one point in the idealized past, forever without end, as opposed to allowing the system to exercise its capacity to change in response to stress. You cite anoxic ocean blobs; you cite, quite brilliantly I thought, the devastating effect beavers have on their local habitat.

Daniel Brooks: Yeah.

Peter Watts: And you take on the sacred spirit animal of the World Wildlife Fund, the polar bear. And the bottom line here is that shit happens, things change, trust life to find a way, ‘cause evolution hasn’t steered us wrong yet.

Daniel Brooks: Yeah.

Peter Watts: Now, this is an argument that some might say is invasible by cheaters. I read this and I thought of the Simpsons episode where Montgomery Burns is railing to Lisa, and he says, “Nature started the struggle for survival, and now she wants to call it off because she’s losing? I say, hard cheese!” And less fictitiously, Rush Limbaugh has invoked essentially the same argument when he was advocating against the protection of the spotted owl. You know, life will find a way. This is evolution; this is natural selection. So, I can see cherry-picking oil executives being really happy with this book. How do you guard against that?

Daniel Brooks: Anybody can cherry-pick anything, and they will. Our attitude is just basically saying, look, here’s the fundamental response to any of this stuff. It’s, how’s it working out so far? OK? There’s a common adage by tennis coaches that says during a match, you never change your winning game, and you always change your losing game. That’s what we’re saying.

One of the things that’s really important for us to focus on is to understand why it is that human beings are so susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea, and are not. Sal and I say, here are some things that seem to be common to human misbehavior, with respect to their survival. One is that human beings really like drama. Human beings really like magic. And human beings don’t like to hear bad news, especially if it means that they’re personally responsible for the bad news. And that’s a very gross, very superficial thing, but beneath that is a whole bunch of really sophisticated stuff about how human brains work, and the relationship between human beings’ ability to conceptualize the future, but living and experiencing the present.

There seems to be a mismatch within our brain — this is an ongoing sort of sloppy evolutionary phenomenon. So that’s why we spend so much time in the first half of the book talking about human evolution, and that’s why we adopt a nonjudgmental approach to understanding how human beings have gotten themselves into this situation. Because everything that human beings have done for 3 million years has seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s only been in the last 100 or 150 years that human beings have begun to develop ways of thinking that allow us to try to project future consequences and to think about unanticipated consequences, long-term consequences of what we do now. So this is very new for humanity, and as a consequence, it’s ridiculous to place blame on our ancestors for the situation we’re in now.

“We’re hoping that people will begin seriously thinking that our short-term well-being is best served by thinking about our long-term survival.”

Everything that people did at any point in time seemed like a good idea at the time; it seemed to solve a problem. If it worked for a while, that was fine, and when it no longer worked, they tried to do something else. But now we seem to be at a point where our ability to survive in the short term is compromised, and what we’re saying is that our way to survive better in the short term, ironically, is now based on a better understanding of how to survive in the long run. We’re hoping that people will begin seriously thinking that our short-term well-being is best served by thinking about our long-term survival.

Peter Watts: What you’ve just stated is essentially that short-term goals and long-term goals are not necessarily the same thing, that one trades off against the other. When you put it that way, it seems perfectly obvious — although I have to say, what you’re advocating for presumes a level of foresight and self-control that our species has, shall we say, not traditionally manifested. But yeah, a widely adhered-to view of evolution is a reactive one— the pool is drying up, and evolution looks at that and says, oh my goodness, the pool is drying up! We should probably get those fish to evolve lungs. Whereas what evolution actually does is say, oh look, the pool is drying up! Good thing that fish over in the corner that everybody picked on has a perforated swim bladder; it might be able to, like, breathe air long enough to make it over to the next pool. Too bad about all those other poor bastards who are going to die. And to hone that down to a specific example that you guys cite in the book, you’re saying “high fitness equals low fitness” — that you need variation to cope with future change.

Daniel Brooks: Right.

Peter Watts: So optimal adaptation to a specific environment implies a lack of variation. When you’re optimally adapted to one specific environment, you are screwed the moment the environment changes. And the idea that high fitness equals low fitness is what I call a counterintuitive obvious point: It is something that seems oxymoronic and even stupid when you first hear it, but when you think about it for more than two seconds, it’s like — who was it that responded to “The Origin of Species” by saying, Of course! How silly of me not to have thought of it myself. I’ve forgotten who said that.

Daniel Brooks: A lot of biology professors, who then wrote articles about how they actually had thought of it for themselves, but nobody paid any attention to that!

Peter Watts: And that might be one of the more essential values of this book — that it reminds us of things we should already know, but never thought about rigorously enough to actually realize.

Shifting gears to another key point in the book, democracy, which you describe as the one form of government that allows the possibility of change without violence. But you also admit — and this is a quote: “Our governance systems, long ago coopted as instruments for amplified personal power, have become nearly useless, at all levels from the United Nations to the local city council. Institutions established during 450 generations of unresolvable conflict cannot facilitate change because they are designed to be agents of social control, maintaining what philosopher John Rawls called ‘the goal of the well-ordered society.’ They were not founded with global climate change, the economics of wellbeing, or conflict resolution in mind.” So what you are essentially saying here is that anyone trying to adopt the Darwinian principles that you and Sal are advocating is going to be going up against established societal structures, which makes you, by definition, an enemy of the state.

Daniel Brooks: Yes.

Peter Watts: And we already live in a world where staging sit-down protests in favor of Native land rights or taking pictures of a factory farm is enough to get you legally defined as a terrorist.

Daniel Brooks: That’s right. Yeah.

Peter Watts: So, how are we not looking at a violent revolution here?

Daniel Brooks: That’s a really good point. I mean, that’s a really critical point. And it’s a point that was addressed in a conference a year ago that I attended, spoke in, in Stockholm, called “The Illusion of Control,” and a virtual conference two years before that called “Buying Time,” where a group of us recognized that the worst thing you could do to try to create social change for survival was to attack social institutions. That the way to cope with social institutions that were non-functional, or perhaps even antithetical to long-term survival, was to ignore them and go around them.

So let me give you an example: I was speaking with member representatives of a rural revitalization NGO in Nebraska a year ago, and they said, “OK, this rural revitalization stuff and climate migration, this sounds like a really good idea. How are we going to get the federal government to support these efforts?” And I said, “They’re not going to.” I said, “You have to understand that in the American situation, the two greatest obstacles to rural revitalization and climate migration are the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is a party of big cities; they don’t want to lose population. The Republican Party is the population of the rural areas; they don’t want people from the cities moving into their areas. Both parties are going to be against this. This is why Joe Biden’s, you know, ‘the climate president,’ but he’s not doing nearly enough. Not even close. Because these people are all locked into the status quo.” And so I told these people, I said, “You don’t ask for permission, and you don’t go to the federal government. You go to the local towns in these rural areas and you say, ‘What do you need? What do you want?’ You then advertise for the kinds of people you want to come in. You want to have electricity self-sufficiency in your town. You need somebody who knows how to build and maintain a solar farm. Advertise for people like that in the big cities. Get them to come and live in your town. Don’t ask the government; do the right thing. Never ask for permission; just do the right thing. They’re not going to pay any attention to you.” And these people said, “Yes, but then if we’re successful, the politicians will come in and claim credit!” And I said, “So what? Who cares! Let them come in, do a photo op, and then they go back to Washington D.C. and they’ll forget you.”

Peter Watts: Maybe. But in cases where it’s been tried, the power utilities step in and squash such efforts as though they were bugs. Set up solar panels and the utility will charge you for “infrastructure maintenance” because by opting out of the grid, you’re not paying “your fair share.” Drive an electric vehicle and you might be subject to an additional “road tax” because, by not paying for gasoline, you’re not paying for road work. The system actively works to make these initiatives fail. And this power goes beyond just stifling progress. They have control of armed forces; they have a monopoly on state violence. We are not allowed to beat up the cops; the cops are allowed to beat us up.

Daniel Brooks: I suppose I have more faith in human nature than is warranted by the evidence. Sal and I do not think such local initiatives will be easy or that they will mostly succeed — at least not until things are so bad that they are the only workable option. What we are saying is that these local initiatives are the Darwinian response to trouble (move away from trouble, generalize in fitness space, and find something that works), and if we recognize trouble early enough, we can opt to begin surviving now. At the same time, during climate perturbations, lots of organisms do not make it, so we need as many individual efforts as possible to increase the chances that someone will survive.

“Local initiatives are the Darwinian response to trouble, and if we recognize trouble early enough, we can opt to begin surviving now.”

There is evidence that some people are doing this, sometimes with the blessing of local and state authorities and without arousing the interest of national authorities. What people need to do is have a commitment to survival, decide what their assets are and their local carrying capacity, and then go about doing the right thing as quietly as possible. As for your point about state violence: What happens if the cops in a small town are the people you go to church with?

Peter Watts: That’s an interesting question.

Daniel Brooks: That’s the point. I mean, what we’re trying to find out, one of the experiments that rural revitalization and, and climate migration is going to resolve for us, is, what is the largest human population that can safeguard itself against being taken over by sociopaths? Let me explain what I mean. Generally speaking, the larger the population, the smaller the number of people who actually control the social control institutions. So you have five different language groups in the city, but somehow it turns out that the people in charge of the religion, or the banks, or the governance only represent one of those language groups. They end up controlling everything. This is a breeding ground for sociopaths to take control. And sure enough, by about 9,000 years ago, when this is all in place, we begin to see religious and governance and economic institutions all support the notion of going to war to take from your neighbors what you want for yourself. And we’ve been at war with ourselves ever since then, and this was not an evolutionary imperative; this was a societal behavioral decision. It’s understandable, in retrospect, as a result of too many people, too high a population density. So you live in circumstances where people cannot identify the sociopaths before they’ve taken control. And that’s the subtext in the idea that one of the ways that we should deal with the fact that more than 50 percent of human beings now live in large cities in climate-insecure places, is for those people to redistribute themselves away from climate-insecure areas, into population centers of lower density, and cooperating networks of low-density populations, rather than big, condensed cities.

Peter Watts: Let’s follow this move back to the rural environment a bit, because it’s fundamental. I mean, you brought it up, and it is fundamental to the modular post-apocalyptic society you’re talking about.

Daniel Brooks: Sure. Not post-apocalyptic: post-collapse.

Peter Watts: Post-collapse. Fair enough. So, another quote from the book: “Neo-protectionists compliment the ever-larger city’s perspective by suggesting that the biosphere would be best served if humans were maximally separated from the wild lands.”

Daniel Brooks: Right.

Peter Watts: “This makes no sense to most humans, and that is why no post-apocalyptic or dystopian novel or film depicts large cities as places of refuge and safety during a crisis.” Just putting up my hand, I can vouch for that, having written my share of apocalyptic sci-fi.

Daniel Brooks: Nobody’s running to the cities.

Peter Watts: “Any attempt to separate humans from the rest of the biosphere would be detrimental to efforts to preserve either.” And I believe at some other point you reference neo-protectionist arguments that we should put aside half of the natural life —

Daniel Brooks: Yeah. That’s E.O. Wilson’s half —

Peter Watts: And putting aside, for the moment, my sympathies for that sentiment — in defense of the neo-protectionists, all of human history says that whenever we interact with nature, we pretty much fuck it up.

Daniel Brooks: No. It doesn’t say that. First of all, when you talk of most of human history, you’re talking about the last thousand years, 2,000 years, 3,000 years. What has been the actual historical record of humans for the last 3 million years?

Peter Watts: I take your point. And it’s a legitimate point when you talk about a global human population, that you mention, in the millions. But we’re at a population of 8 billion now. So accepting, wholesale, without argument, your argument that cities are basically wasteful, unsustaining, pestholes of disease and so on —

Daniel Brooks: That benefit a few people a lot, and treat the great majority as a disposable workforce.

Peter Watts: Yeah. But we still are dealing with a planet in which 94 percent of mammalian biomass on this planet is us and our livestock, so how does that kind of biomass integrate intimately with what remains of our natural environment without just crushing it — or are you anticipating, like, a massive cull of a —

Daniel Brooks: But, see, you’re repeating a bunch of truisms that are not borne out by the actual evidence. We don’t crush — Homo sapiens doesn’t crush the biosphere. Homo sapiens interacts with the biosphere in ways that alter it. See, evolutionary alteration of the environment does not mean collapse. It means change. This is the neo-protectionist language — that any change is going to collapse the biosphere. That’s bullshit. I mean, what human beings are doing to the biosphere right now is nothing compared to what blue-green algae did to the biosphere 4 billion years ago.

“This is the neo-protectionist language — that any change is going to collapse the biosphere. That’s bullshit.”

Peter Watts: Absolutely.

Daniel Brooks: And what happened? Us, OK? The Chicxulub asteroid: If it hadn’t killed the dinosaurs, there would be no us.

Peter Watts: I actually, personally, find comfort in the idea that there have been, what, five major extinction events? And that in every single case, there has been a beautiful, diverse —

Daniel Brooks: Because there was sufficient evolutionary potential to survive.

Peter Watts: Exactly.

Daniel Brooks: Not because a whole bunch of new magical mutations showed up.

Peter Watts: Right. But, it took anywhere from 10 to 30 million years for that to happen —

Daniel Brooks: So?

Peter Watts: — and I would argue that most people — I mean, I’m kind of on your side in this, but I’m also increasingly sympathetic to the human extinction movement. I think most people are hoping for recovery in less geological terms, timescale-wise.

Daniel Brooks: This is a really critical point, because this, then, loops back to the whole Asimov’s Foundation thing. Do we wait 30,000 years for the empire to rebuild, or can we do it in 1,000 years? That’s what we’re talking about. We have great confidence that the biosphere is going to restore itself, within — you know, no matter what we do, unless we make the whole planet a cinder, the biosphere’s going to “restore itself” within, you know, 10 million years. Whatever. That’s fine. And we — you know, some form of humanity — may be part of that, or may not. But the reality is that what we want to do, as human beings, is we want to tip the odds in our favor a little bit. We want to increase the odds that we’re going to be one of those lucky species that survives. And we know enough to be able to do that. We know now enough about evolution to be able to alter our behavior in a way that’s going to increase the odds that we’ll survive. So the question is, are we going to do that? So this whole business of whether or not, you know, what’s going to happen in 3 million years — you’re right: That’s not important. But what happens tomorrow is not important either. What’s important is what happens in the first generation after 2050. That’s what’s important. That first generation after 2050 is going to determine whether or not technological humanity reemerges from an eclipse, or whether Homo sapiens becomes just another marginal primate species.

Radagast: The Grand Work

The Grand Work. Radagast. May 29, 2024.

Crim: Crisis Report

The Crisis Report - 74. Richard Crim, May 28, 2024.

Let’s talk about the next few years.

................ What comes now, is the WAVES. How long do you think it will take the Climate System to absorb this MASSIVE pulse of ENERGY, how long do you think that waves of disequilibrium will ripple through the system?

Part of our problem in dealing with Climate Change is the mismatch between our perception of time and the planetary time scale. We expect things to happen quickly in response to our actions. On a planetary time scale we just got hit by an asteroid last year.

.....................

I guess it comes down to this.

Things are about to DRASTICALLY change in the world. The “good times” of the 20th century golden age of relative peace and plenty are coming to an end.

It’s NOT the “end of the world”.

The world will go on for another 2.5 billion years before we think the sun swells and engulfs it. To future ages we will be an interesting set of fossils and a layer of weird chemicals in the rock strata.

It is the END of “life as we knew it”.

Assorted Musings on Collapse, pt 2

#272: “Peak almost everything”, part two. Tim Morgan, Surplus Energy Economics. March 7, 2024.

WINNERS AND LOSERS

It’s been said that “horse-sense” is the innate wisdom that prevents horses from putting bets on human beings.

I’m not a betting man myself, but we can all see the benefits that must accrue from knowing the outcome of a race before any wagers have even been placed. Those benefits can be greater still if all the mainstream pundits carry on tipping the wrong result.

This is the position that we’re now in, and my aim here is to explain, in brief, why this is.

The long-running contest between the economic orthodoxy and the energy-based alternative is ‘all over bar the shouting’ (though there will be plenty of that), and the energy argument has won.

Anyone who understands the economy as an energy system has an inside track over anyone – the majority – who still believes that economics is the study of money.

Thus understood, asset markets are partying at the end of growth. Governments, corporations and investors are planning for a future that cannot happen. The public is increasingly angry with politicians who promise what cannot possibly be delivered.

The background, at its briefest, is that conventional economics insists that the economy can be explained and understood in terms of money alone. If this were true, it would mean that there need never be any end to economic expansion.

The opponents of this orthodoxy, though they may disagree amongst themselves on many other things, share the insight that, on the contrary, ‘infinite economic growth on a finite planet’ is an impossibility, and that prosperity is a material concept, traceable to the characteristics and behaviour of energy, natural resources and the environment. 

The nature of growth

The battleground here is growth. If the orthodoxy was right, growth should be continuing but, in any meaningful sense, it is not. Momentum – the trend-line of the economy – should be rising or, at the very least, constant, but it has long been heading downwards.

Such meagre “growth” as is still being reported is cosmetic, being faked by the reckless injection of credit into the system.

If, in order to deliver one dollar, euro, yen or pound of growth, we have to create more than one dollar, euro, yen or pound of new credit, part of any reported growth is being faked. Using the narrow definition of formal debt, each dollar of global growth has, over the past twenty years, been accompanied by $3.20 of net new borrowing.

On a broader basis, including the credit assets of the NBFI (“shadow banking”) system for which data is incomplete, the ratio of credit expansion to growth is probably well in excess of 7:1.

This, of course, cannot continue in perpetuity. The end result must be default, and a loss of faith in the value of fiat money.

These divergences are illustrated in Fig. 1, from which it will be apparent that the gap between debt and GDP has widened to the point of unsustainability, with average “growth” of 3.5% over the past twenty years manufactured by borrowing at an annual average rate of 11% of GDP. The situation with regard to broader financial liabilities is even worse. ..........

Short Takes — 13: I realize I’m asking a LOT of you, my readers. Richard Crim. March 1, 2024.

I KNOW, I sound like a “crazy” person.

I’m telling you “Climate Science” is BROKEN and the Climate Apocalypse has started. I’m telling you to ignore the mainstream voices and narratives you will hear on television, social media, and the news.

I am “arrogantly” claiming that I “see” what’s happening and understand the Climate System better than almost any other commentator\analyst currently writing.

And, I am asking you to believe me.

Almost no one else agrees with my analysis.

For now.

In five years they will. They will have no choice, in five years it will be obvious I am right.

RIGHT NOW.

Listening to me, believing in my analysis, accepting the validity of what I am saying, is asking a LOT of you, my Readers. I’m telling you that it’s going to get twice as hot, twice as fast than anyone expected.

I’m telling you that the Elites fucked up “big time” and our civilization is about to Collapse.

Asking you to take me seriously is a “BIG ASK”, it’s a lot.

In my next article I am summing up where the data has taken me and what I “see”. Spoiler Alert, it’s not good and it’s going to be FAST.

.............

Don’t read it unless you want to know how bad it’s going to be.

...........

Because the consequence of ACCUMULATION is AMPLIFICATION it has been understood since 1974 that the Poles would warm up faster than the rest of the planet. They have always been our planetary “sacrifice zones”.

..........

Now we know, the GISS model was WRONG and STILL IS.

The Oceans hold onto HEAT about twice as efficiently as the Moderates assumed they would. About twice as much HEAT as the Moderates projected would reach the Poles, is actually what/s happening.

The Moderate Faction in Climate Science, the ones we have been listening too since the 80’s. THEY GOT EVERYTHING WRONG.

.......

Assorted Musings on Collapse

******* The #1 Reason I Became A Doomer. Alan Urban, Collapse Musings. Jan. 16, 2024.
We're not doomed because of climate change, resource depletion, or biodiversity loss. We're doomed because human nature made those things inevitable.

There are many reasons I became a doomer.

Climate change is accelerating and governments aren’t taking it seriously. The sixth mass extinction event is well underway and most people don’t care. Fossil fuels and other crucial resources are running out and most people don’t even know. Pollution in the form of microplastics and forever chemicals are rapidly accumulating in our bodies, lowering sperm counts and causing all sorts of health problems.

And all that is because of overshoot. We’ve already exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet, so it’s only a matter of time before the global population comes crashing down. But overshoot isn’t the main reason I became a doomer. In fact, I became a doomer about a year before I knew what overshoot means.

The main reason I became a doomer is because I realized that the challenge we’re facing is so monumentally large and complicated that humans are incapable of overcoming it. 

This idea upsets some people. They say things like, “What about World War II? Look at how the U.S. mobilized the entire nation to help defeat the Axis powers.”

Yea, after they were attacked and only because they had a clear enemy. This time, we can’t simply declare fossil fuels the enemy and stop using them overnight. Doing that would cause civilization to collapse, anyway.

Besides, fossil fuels aren’t the only problem. As I’ve explained before, we would still be headed for collapse even if there were no climate change or pollution because we’re completely dependent on finite resources (forests, aquifers, fossil fuels, rare-earth minerals, etc.) that will mostly be gone in a matter of decades.

Even after learning all this, people still say things like, “What about the Montreal Protocol? Look at how the entire world came together, created an agreement to protect the ozone layer, and followed through.”

Yea, but there’s a big difference between phasing out CFCs and giving up a source of energy that provides 80% of the world’s power, not to mention plastic, fertilizer, and thousands of other products. Even if we could quit fossil fuels, we would just tear up the world’s remaining ecosystems in search of rare-earth metals and other resources.

Despite the enormity of the polycrisis, people still say things like, “We’ll find a way. Look at everything humans have accomplished over the last two centuries: automobiles, airplanes, telephones, computers, and modern medicine.”

Yea, but only because of fossil fuels. Humans have been about as intelligent as we are today for at least 100,000 years, but we only just now managed to invent all these things. Have you ever wondered why?

It’s because starting about 250 years ago, we harnessed a source of energy that, at the time, was practically limitless. We used this energy to build the modern world, but now we have to somehow maintain the modern world while transitioning away from this source of energy. So-called renewables and battery technologies can’t replace everything fossil fuels do for us, and even if they could, we’re already out of time.

To be clear, I’m not saying humans aren’t intelligent enough to deal with the polycrisis. I believe that if everyone on the planet became collapse-aware and committed to saving the human race and as much of the natural world as possible, we could actually pull it off. The population would still decline due to overshoot, but we could turn the decline into a glide instead of a crash.

The problem isn’t a lack of intelligence. Rather, the problem is both psychological and sociological. Humans are incapable of overcoming the polycrisis because they tend to ignore or deny facts that make them uncomfortable. ...........................

Once you realize that humans have a tendency to deny death, the world starts to make a lot more sense. It explains why so many people believe there’s an afterlife despite a total lack of evidence. It also explains why people deny climate change is real despite the fact that there are decades of evidence and countless studies by thousands of climate scientists from all around the world.

In order to acknowledge that climate change (or peak oil, the sixth mass extinction, etc.) is real, you also have to acknowledge that your lifestyle is contributing to the destruction of the planet and the early death of millions (if not billions) of people. It means that everything the human race has achieved over the last two centuries was all for naught—that all we’ve done is destroy our home and ourselves.

This is a hard pill to swallow for people who believe humans are special. If you believe God created humans and put us here for some divine purpose, it’s hard to accept that we’ve behaved no better than bacteria consuming a piece of fruit. It feels much better to deny the science and continue living like you always have.

So we continue on without changing our ways. ..............

Even those who acknowledge that climate change is real tend to deny the reality of the situation. Recently, I read an article in The Guardian called I thought most of us were going to die from the climate crisis. I was wrong. It’s a case study that perfectly exemplifies the human penchant for denial. ...........

Another reason she’s optimistic is because “low-carbon technologies are becoming cost-competitive.” True, but has she ever thought about how we get the materials for those “low-carbon technologies”?

We use diesel to mine and transport the metals. We use coal or natural gas to produce the cement. We use oil to create the plastic. Until all of these things are made without fossil fuels, these new technologies aren’t exactly “low-carbon.”

To get off of fossil fuels, every fossil fuel power plant and internal combustion engine in the entire world has to be replaced by windmills, solar panels, electric vehicles, and more batteries than you can imagine so we can have power when it’s not windy or sunny.

It would take an unbelievable amount of fossil fuels to achieve this. Meanwhile, we’re already committed to 2°C of warming, after which we’ll start triggering irreversible tipping points. As I said before, we’re already out of time. ..........

Later, she offers another reason for hope when she says, “the world has already passed the peak of per capita emissions. It happened a decade ago. Most people are unaware of this.”

That’s great, but global emissions are still rising. It doesn’t matter if per capita emissions are going down if overall emissions are still going up. But Ritchie is “optimistic we can peak global emissions in the 2020s.”

She could be right about that, but just because our emissions stop rising doesn’t mean the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere stops rising, too. As our emissions go down, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will keep going up, only at a slower rate.

She goes on to explain how thanks to improvements in technology and energy efficiency, her carbon footprint is less than half that of her grandparents’ at her age. Maybe so, but there are also three times as many people in the world today, so we’re still burning more fossil fuels than ever before. ........

Even if everyone in the world lowered their carbon footprint to zero and we stopped emissions overnight, the CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere would keep warming the planet until the Earth reaches a new energy balance.

According to James Hansen, one of the most highly-respected climate scientists in the world, the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere would lead to 10°C of warming over the next few centuries, and as much as 6 or 7°C in one century. And that doesn’t include future emissions. 

There’s something else that would happen if we stopped emissions overnight: Global temperatures would spike. Few people know this, but a small percentage of sunlight is blocked by pollution (especially aerosols) from fossil fuels. Thanks to this pollution, the planet is about .. cooler than it otherwise would be. .........

I don’t mean to attack Hannah Ritchie. I’m sure she’s a great person, and I think she truly believes what she’s saying, but that’s the problem. She was so terrified of climate breakdown that she convinced herself there’s still hope. She simply couldn’t handle the horrifying reality that billions of people are going to die an early death, so she found a way to deny it.

And now she’s telling people that we can maintain modern civilization and stop climate change. That we can have our cake and eat it too. By doing this, she’s only making things worse. Books and articles like hers make it easier for people to deny reality and continue their carbon-based lifestyles without feeling guilty or afraid.

If climate change had a simple fix—like the Montreal Protocol—we would have done it already. But there is no fix for climate change. At best, we could slow it down, but that would require most people to drastically lower their standard of living—something like a permanent Great Depression. And since that is unthinkable, people deny the truth and tell themselves everything will be okay. 

That’s why I became a doomer. I realized that people are unwilling to make the changes necessary to avoid collapse, so they deny reality and cling to false hope. For decades, scientists have been warning us that we have to act as soon as possible, yet all we’ve done is the bare minimum. I don’t see any signs of that changing.

Humans simply didn’t evolve to handle a situation like this, and now there is research confirming it. According to a study by the University of Maine, certain features of human evolution could be stopping us from solving environmental problems. Researchers looked at how sustainable human systems emerged in the past, and they found two patterns:

Sustainable systems emerge only after groups have failed to maintain their resources. But today, if we don’t learn our lesson until after we’ve exhausted our resources, it will be too late. We won’t have the option to relocate to a new area because climate change and resource depletion are happening everywhere.

Systems of environmental protection tend to address problems within societies, not between societies. To slow down climate change, we would need worldwide regulatory, economic, and social systems. Without that, individual countries and regions will focus on their own problems and could even go to war with their neighbors for resources.

As the lead author, Tim Waring, said, "This means global challenges like climate change are much harder to solve than previously considered…It's not just that they are the hardest thing our species has ever done. They absolutely are. The bigger problem is that central features in human evolution are likely working against our ability to solve them.”

Inexhaustible Flows? Tom Murphy, Do The Math. Feb. 20, 2024.

I recently came across a statement to the effect that once we transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy like solar, wind, and hydro, we would essentially be home free for the long run—tapping into inexhaustible flows. It is a very pleasant notion, to be sure, and one that I believe is relatively common among enthusiasts for renewable energy.

Naturally, I am concerned by the question of: what magnificent things would we do with everlasting copious energy? As an excellent guide, we can ask what amazing things have we done with the recent bolus of energy from fossil fuels? Well, in the course of pursuing material affluence, we have eliminated 85% of primeval forest, made new deserts, created numerous oceanic dead zones, drained swamps, lost whole ecosystems, almost squashed the remaining wild land mammals, and initiated a sixth mass extinction with extinction rates perhaps thousands of times higher than their background levels—all without the help of CO2 and climate change (which indeed adds to the list of ills). These trends are still accelerating. Yay for humans, who can now (temporarily) live in greater comfort and numbers than at any time in history!

But the direction I want to take in this post is on the narrower (and ultimately less important) technical side. All the renewable energy technologies rely on non-renewable materials. Therefore, inexhaustible flows are beside the point. It’s like saying that fossil fuel energy is not practically limited by available oxygen for combustion, so we can enjoy fossil fuels indefinitely. Or that D–T fusion has billions of years of deuterium available, when there’s no naturally-occurring tritium (thus reliant on limited lithium supply). In a multi-part system, the limiting factor is, well, the limiting factor. Sure, into the far future the sun will shine, the wind will blow, and rain will fall. But capturing those flows to make electricity will require physical stuff: all the more material for such diffuse flows. If that stuff is not itself of renewable origin, then oops. The best guarantee of renewability is being part of natural regeneration (i.e., of biological origin). If solar panels, wires, inverters, and batteries were made of wood and the like: alright, then. ..........

Telling the Truth About Our Future. Art Berman. Feb. 27, 2024.

............................... How many EROI analysts can even explain what I just wrote or know how to find that information? Yet they proclaim with troubling certitude that there is an emerging consensus that fossil fuels have a lower EROI than renewables.

Delannoy and his co-authors do not mean to be misleading. They think they are telling the truth and that’s the problem. True believers are willing to go to any length to convince us of their truth. They believe it so strongly that they cannot be objective.

The sad truth is that a renewable energy transition is imaginary. ................

Society is in a terrible predicament. Papers like Delannoy’s give false hope that there is a renewable pathway that can save us from climate change. But climate change is just the tip of the iceberg.

Over-consumption of all energy is destroying earth’s ecosystem—the true basis of wealth that forms the foundation for human prosperity. This includes the destruction of forests, the genocide of the animal kingdom, the pollution of land, rivers and seas, the acidification of the oceans, and loss of fisheries and coral reefs.

Focusing on climate change alone is a narrow view. Carbon dioxide is just one of the pollutants contaminating the environment. The growth of the human enterprise enabled by excess energy use threatens everything. Substituting renewable for fossil energy will make that problem even worse.

We are well beyond a soft landing for the planet. There are no moderate pathways forward. Pretending that there are is counter-productive. A radical reduction in all energy consumption is the only solution.

The problem is that it’s not the solution that we like but it’s time to start telling the truth about our future.

***** #271: “Peak almost everything”, part one. Tim Morgan, Surplus Energy Economics. Feb 26, 2024.

WORSENING STRESSES IN AN INFLECTING ECONOMY

As almost everyone must have noticed by now, economic and broader affairs are in a strange state of uneasy limbo. The economy certainly hasn’t ‘collapsed’, as some pundits have long been predicting, but neither is it growing, in any meaningful sense.

Conditions are characterised by worsening hardship and widening inequality, and this, compounded by suspicion and mistrust, is making itself felt in increasingly fractious domestic politics. A disturbing feedback loop ties internal political discontent into the stresses of dysfunctional international relations.

There’s a growing feeling that ‘things aren’t working’, and that the continuing affluence of a minority is in striking contrast with the deteriorating economic circumstances (and worsening insecurity) of the majority.

One can almost sense a collective holding of breath as we wait to see ‘what happens next’.

I cannot escape a conviction that very few people really understand that what we’re experiencing now isn’t some kind of temporary economic stasis, but the cusp of a fundamental change for which societies are not prepared.

Accordingly, the aim here is to use the SEEDS model to make sense of this unquiet calm, and to provide some insights into what actually does ‘happen next’.

In summary, hardship and stress at the level of the micro – that is, of the household and the individual – are about to extend into disorder at the level of the macro. We’re heading very rapidly into “peak almost everything”.

The qualifying “almost” is necessary, and we need to know how we can best navigate the turbulence that is now about to commence. We need to work out which activities – which sources of income, employment, revenue, profit and value – are likely to buck the generalised trend of disorderly decline.

The two-stage inflexion

Stated at its simplest, growth in material economic prosperity has long been decelerating towards a point at which the economy as a whole inflects from expansion into contraction. .........

Our best recourse is to objective analysis of economic and financial fundamentals.

Properly defined, the economy is a system for the supply of material products and services to society.

Thus seen, the economy is an energy system, not a financial one. Nothing that has any economic value at all can be provided without the use of energy. Money has no intrinsic worth, but commands value only as an “exercisable claim” on the output of the material economy. We know that the large and complex economy of today has been built on an abundance of low-cost energy sourced from oil, natural gas and coal.

The factor which does most to determine economic prosperity is the material cost of energy supply. If delivering 100 units of energy requires using the equivalent of 99 units in order to make it available, the game is scarcely worth the candle.

If, on the other hand, 100 energy units can be delivered at a cost of only 1 energy unit, this activity is immensely productive of economic value.

Energy is never ‘free’, but comes at a cost measurable in terms of the proportion of accessed energy needed to create and sustain the infrastructure required for energy supply. This cost is known here as the Energy Cost of Energy, abbreviated ECoE.

Globally, trend ECoEs reached their low point in the quarter-century after the Second World War, explaining the super-rapid economic growth enjoyed in that period.

Since then, ECoEs have trended upwards because of the depletion of fossil fuel resources. Oil, gas and coal remain abundant, but have been getting progressively costlier to access. Renewables, with their lesser energy densities, cannot take us back to a halcyon age of ultra-cheap energy.

Being unable – or unwilling – to face the implications of rising ECoEs, we’ve long been playing a game of “let’s pretend” with the economy. Because GDP is a measure of financial transactions – and not of material economic value – we can create a simulacrum of “growth” by pouring ever-increasing amounts of liquidity into the system.

Nobody needed credit deregulation, QE or sub-zero real interest rates in the 1945-70 period, because low ECoEs were driving the economy along, ‘very nicely, thank you’, without recourse to financial manipulation. Only as the economy has decelerated have we adopted various forms of monetary gimmickry in order to pretend that the illogical promise of ‘infinite economic growth on a finite planet’ remains a valid expectation.

Using the concepts of two economies, energy-determined prosperity and money as claim, SEEDS models the trajectories of financial and material economic trends. As can be seen in Fig. 2, ECoEs have been rising relentlessly, and surplus (ex-cost) energy supply has been decelerating towards contraction. Per capita surplus energy has inflected into decline, and prosperity per capita has taken on a downwards trajectory.

Accompanying this, financial stresses have been worsening. Debt has massively outgrown reported GDP as credit expansion has been deployed to create purely cosmetic “growth” (Fig. 3A). It required annual borrowing of more than 11% of GDP to sustain illusory “growth” at a supposed average of 3.5% (3B) over the past twenty years. Broader liabilities have exploded (3C), and the state of disequilibrium between the financial system and the underlying material economy has become extreme (3D).

When we apply the extent of disequilibrium stress pictured in Fig. 3D to the quantum of exposure shown in Fig. 3C, the end result – a massive and disorderly financial correction – becomes a foregone conclusion.

With the exception of the stress measure illustrated in 3D, we don’t need access to the SEEDS system to work out that this ‘bigger-than-the-GFC correction’ cannot long be delayed, and will happen at the moment when the delusory promise of perpetual economic growth loses the last shreds of its credibility. .................

All of these processes are going to change the balance of forces in civil society, such that politics becomes ever more unpredictable.

A point that cannot be emphasised too strongly is that economic deterioration, with all of its attendant stresses, is moving from the predicted to the experienced.

Some discretionary sectors are already contracting. Politics is already becoming dysfunctional. The hardship being presented officially as a temporary problem is, in reality, a foretaste of the shape of things to come – or, perhaps more aptly, the shape of things to go.

What is Latent Heat of Fusion? Erik Michaels, Problems, Predicaments and Technology. Feb. 28, 2024.

Imagine my surprise last week when I read Tom Murphy's article after publishing my own and discovering that there was a common theme to both. Tom often writes about the unsustainability of our behaviors and civilization, but to describe common beliefs of many of the cornucopian-type thinking that so many people have today struck me as funny being it was so coincidental. Isn't it ironic that biological life has figured out how to tap into inexhaustible flows of energy and this is essentially sustainable but technology use (and our dependence upon it) doesn't even come close? A similar article from The Honest Sorcerer also tells the same story.

Perhaps what I often find incomprehensible is how people come to these stances of hopium regarding emerging qualities of collapse and thinking that we are embarking on some sort of beautiful, sustainable journey to the future. Of course, it becomes rather obvious over time that most of these people simply haven't widened their perspective to include all aspects of ecological overshoot and collapse - their perspectives are limited to their own specialty within their own field of study and the silo they seem to be stuck in acts as an echo chamber. ....................... 

Last week, I posted some information about what is commonly called "forever chemicals" to point out the existential issue of pollution loading. This was initially pointed out more than 50 years ago in the Limits to Growth study as shown in this video which I have posted before several times. My purpose last week was to demonstrate how symptom predicaments of overshoot are combining and interacting as threat multipliers not only to civilization, but to our very existence as a species. As usual, a new study came out that proves that this issue is worse than originally thought due to symptom predicaments of climate change spreading these toxins further afield due to extreme weather events and wildlife contaminated with the toxins moving around and further contaminating water and soil. Almost every week, regardless of what topic I write about, I find new information a week or two later proving how the situation is even worse than what I originally wrote about, just like in this particular issue. .............

Two paragraphs up, I posted an article about the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) which delineates some scary thoughts. What I didn't point out there is what I again want to bring to the forefront (I've brought this topic up before (a long time ago), but these things have a tendency to be forgotten). The beginning of this article reviews some of the same information from last week and expands on that theme; but along the same lines of thinking, I want to bring up something most people are not aware of or have forgotten. This is the latent heat of fusion, the topic of today's picture at the top. I was introduced to this by the fact that 80 calories of heat will melt one gram of ice (at 0 degrees Celsius) so that it becomes water (phase change) and then that same amount of heat applied to the water will raise the temperature of that water to 80 degrees Celsius. Think about how the biosphere is losing its cryosphere and what that means for the world's air conditioning system. These exponential changes are now baked into the system through both oceanic thermal inertia and the lag effect. Climate change, the symptom predicament of overshoot, is irreversible on human timescales. 

I needed to get through all the above material to get to this point that today is the absolute best day of the rest of your life.

I don't want to sound grim or bring inconvenient truths to the forefront, but denying the existence of this knowledge makes no sense. Essentially, this is what most people want you to do - deny the existence and implication of these facts. While it is true (and I have repeatedly said this time and again) that we don't know precisely what will happen and when it will happen, certain events are inevitable and it is only a question of when, not if. Collapse of industrial civilization is built in, as it is self-terminating. Once this occurs, the loss of a large portion of the aerosol masking effect (global dimming) will also be lost and global warming will once again suddenly increase, similar to what has taken place over the last several years due to the loss of aerosols produced from the marine shipping industry. Despite reducing particulate matter in the atmosphere, the IMO 2020 rules have had mixed results as this article points out. Once again, something labeled as a "solution" has unexpected results. My point is not to simply ridicule ideas that many people think of as solutions or proper responses; one still needs to respond in an appropriate fashion and certain ideas (like degrowth) are the only appropriate responses available. However, just because these ideas have been brought around to the forefront of society does NOT mean that they will solve the predicament of overshoot or prevent civilization from crashing. Taken together with the inevitable outcomes of climate change and energy and resource decline (both symptom predicaments of overshoot) multiplying each other's effects, these hard facts point out that conditions will never be better than they are right now. 

This is why it is so important to embrace and be grateful for what we have right now and to Live Now!

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.