Collapse - Part 3/5: Anger
Nobody knows and nobody cares
Preface: Becoming Collapse Aware is no joke. Anger is a normal part of the five stages of grief. The following blog post is my way of cathartically expressing some of my frustrations.
The series can be read in any order. Read Part 1/5: Denial - Read Part 2/5: Depression
We couldn't resist the carbon pulse. We just couldn't. We all wanted in on the magic juice, consequences be damned.
Resources are for the taking, so the environment is for plundering. Enslavement of Man seamlessly led to extractivism. The endless transfer of wealth from poor to rich could continue despite The Abolition. We had already perfected the modern serfdom of wage slavery by then, anyway.
Besides, the smoke seemed to dissipate into thin air before our very eyes, so nobody cared to listen when Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius sounded the alarm in 1896.
We became instantly addicted. In truth, we never stood a chance. The fossil fuel trap was sprung, and one thing led to another. And as I will make clear in this blog post, the light at the end of the tunnel is nothing but the burglar alarm.
A single barrel of oil contains enough energy to perform work equivalent to several years of human labour, like having hundreds of nonhuman energy slaves at your bidding. How do you say no to that? We turned a blind eye.
All we had to do was kick the can down the road and let our grandchildren pay the price. It’s a win-lose situation, and we win. The biggest winner of us all famously laughed all the way to space.
Yes, I’m immediately launching into a rant against billionaires.
How pathologically insane does a person have to be to feel compulsively compelled to hoard more wealth than their entire lineage could ever spend?
It’s a rhetorical question; the answer is well understood. It doesn’t matter how rich you are, you’re still human. Every pleasure desensitises us, so we need ever bigger hits to keep feeling the same result. We call it hedonic adaptation. And keeping up with the Joneses is such a core part of human nature that rich people just can’t help themselves from having soul-defiling yacht-measuring contests.
This is just another example of how our brains’ inadequacies are one of the cornerstones of collapse. And history shows how elites always hoard power and wealth until it ends in death and revolts.
The real question is, why is everyone not cancelling the living hell out of them? Why do we revere the rich instead of shaming them?
We used to bring out pitchforks and guillotines when things got bad enough. I say we have become much too complacent, and have forgotten the paradox of tolerance:
“In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.” — Karl Popper
In my opinion, this crucial concept doesn’t just apply to dealing with religious fanatics gleefully intent on blowing people up to collect their 72 virgins in heaven asap — not to mention genocidal behaviour in general — but also regarding pathologically insane billionaires “indirectly” causing the death of millions while hiding behind a smokescreen of whataboutism.
If the infinitely rich don’t understand why societies need progressive taxation to survive — and that they are part of society regardless of how icky that feels to them — I say we are well beyond the point they should be made examples of. Harshly.
Moving right along, observe how our politicians seek reelection in our dysfunctional political systems by making comforting promises to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
To be fair, ignoring for a moment how power causes brain damage, how beholden politicians are to vested interests, and how oblivious they are to physical realities, there is no way to achieve that (see below), so all promises must necessarily be broken.
The few politicians who understand the gravity of the situation and try to hint at the necessary sacrifices we must all make are laughed off the stage. Hence, honesty accomplishes nothing, as it simply passes the buck to the next rando. Thus, they have their hands tied as long as public sentiment remains as it is.
It’s not that people don’t get that money needs to be out of politics and that reelection concerns strongly motivate shortsightedness; it’s that the system is locked in, corrupted, and too entrenched to change. It took thousands of years to abolish slavery. Unfortunately, we’ve run out of time when it comes to reforming the political system. Political impotence is yet another nail in the coffin.
Lies, lies, lies
The government-backed IPCC projections about climate change must assume we will invent magical new Bioenergy with Carbon Capture & Storage (BECSS) and Carbon Capture & Removal (CDR) tech that can suck carbon from the air in utterly absurd quantities to even pretend there will be many humans left alive in a century or two, not to mention ignore all the positive feedback loops and cascading tipping points. By 2050 they will probably be promising perpetual motion and time machines, because that’s what we’ll be needing.
Of course, it’s all very sensible if governments absolutely, positively must prevent people from giving up all hope, something the Harvard psychologist Prof. Dan Gilbert talks about on The Happiness Lab podcast. Such people might stop buying things they don't need with money they don't have to impress people they don't like. So, are these IPCC reports successfully censored with that in mind? Do you even need to ask?
No politicians will admit that the minerals and rare metals we need for the first generation of renewables may not even exist on our planet and would pollute and cost too much to mine enough of even if they did. Ignoring that, what about when it all needs replacing in a couple of decades? I guess that’s another problem for our children to solve.
Any possibility of achieving Net Zero by 2000-whatever is impossible. Renewables on the global scale we need to live sustainably forever are a pie in the sky, a necessary lie to, once again, kick the can down the road.
“The ‘fake green fairytale’ claims humanity can maintain current levels of consumption (a lie) by being powered by renewables (a lie) which are already displacing fossil fuels (a lie) and therefore reach Net Zero (a lie) to bring temperatures down to safe levels within just a few years (a lie) to secure a sustainable future for all (a lie) and that the enemies of this outcome are the critics of the energy transition (a lie) who are all funded or influenced by the fossil fuel industry (a lie) so the proponents of green globalist aims are ethical in doing whatever it takes to achieve their aims (a lie).” - Jem Bendell, author of Breaking Together (PDF)
There are, however, much bigger problems than being lied to and sacrificed by the elites. I’m not even warmed up yet.
Ignorance abounds
No one has heard of Jevon's paradox despite how it dominates our entire civilisation’s behaviour: Whenever we improve our efficiency, we just consume more instead of appreciatively lowering our consumption, pretending the environment is an infinite pollution sink.
Very few people know that most money is created out of thin air via debt creation and that the interest due doesn’t exist, so it can only be repaid by taking on more debt, a perfect example of a doom spiral with only one outcome.
Capitalism, based on debt as it is, thus requires infinite growth to function. It collapses if you don’t feed it, taking all of society with it. And because GDP is causally correlated with our pollution and rapid resource depletion, Capitalism is a highway to hell. Our collective doom was sealed when Capitalism was given free rein to run amok.
We’re liquidating our one-time material inheritance in an orgy of overconsumption. In a sick game of perpetual intergenerational theft, we're running a centuries-long Ponzi scheme. Just don’t get caught holding the bag.
Some nations run into annoying regulation policies, so they cook their books by outsourcing their production to places like India and China in what is effectively waste colonialism, hoping no one of any importance protests too much.
Duly, nobody still allowed inside the press room bats an eye when governments proudly proclaim that “resource use is dropping” in a couple of niche areas as more and more industries move abroad to countries forced to put short-term survival over long-term ditto.
This compliance from the media is itself a symptom of a fatally doomed society. Due to various factors — including capitalism, the doom and gloom effect mentioned in Part 1, and Moloch, the evil demon of game theory — media trying to serve the public inevitably lose out to media that serve the public what they prefer:
Speaking of Moloch: if a producer — whether small companies or entire nations — is made to internalise the cost of pollution, they quickly lose out to competitors that are not. This might be overcome by worldwide regulation, which, let’s be real, the nations of the world will never agree on, so that’s yet another Game Over.
Not feeling checkmated enough on this tangent? No worries: An extensive study has found that not a single industry would be profitable if it were forced to internalise the costs of pollution. So there’s that.
Let’s look a bit deeper
Even if one could get the occasional economist our governments are fatally enamoured by to admit that infinite growth on a finite planet isn’t possible — a scenario so far-fetched it frankly sounds like fiction — they remain so untethered from reality that they imagine such fantasies as us being able to decouple growth from energy & resource use, even though it has yet to happen anywhere. It’s as if they fundamentally disagree that the capitalistic system is entirely embedded within Earth’s biosphere.
“Separating the economy from energy and material flows fails any scientific scrutiny, yet dominates the pedagogy and practice of economics.” - Jon D. Erikson, The Progress Illusion
Economists refuse to accept how doubling global GDP and its associated energy & resource use every 25 years is stupidly impossible. And they see no shame in being utterly energy-blind. Why would they? In a case of fatal symbiosis, we continue to reward them with bigger and bigger pay cheques.
“The world’s leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they’re pushing with all their might in the wrong direction.” - Donella Meadows in Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
The second law of thermodynamics proves that waste heat alone would boil the oceans in 400 years with such exponential growth. One economist bizarrely claimed that we can grow 1% a year for the next 7 billion years (later “corrected” to 7 million), not bothering, one must assume, to spitball the numbers showing how that would still result in more humans on Earth than there are atoms in the observable Universe by thirty thousand orders of magnitude. You can’t make this stuff up.
Sadly, unlike in areas such as science, art, and morality, where generational churn makes room for new and better views and ideas, the opaque window between economic theory and actual reality remains forever solid, as the mind virus of neoliberal thinking enjoys a high enough R-Naught value to perpetually infect a critical mass of new students via our fatally flawed educational institutions. A vaccine remains to be found for this plague; Lord knows we have tried.
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” - Frederic Jameson
People whose careers depend on it tend to get things right, funnily enough, and they are predicting a 50% drop in GDP in 60 years due to the effects of climate change, which I do believe this essay correctly calls out to be a civilisational-ending event in and of itself. For comparison, we dropped 8% during The Great Depression, 5% during the 2008 financial crash and 4% during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
We will yearn for those times; mark my words. Our supermarkets will be empty pronto. Not because we could afford the inevitably hyperinflated prices, but because there will be nothing to steal.
The few naive preppers who bothered to relearn how to grow potatoes and filter water will be set upon by desperate hordes willing to cannibalise their own children. Who does such things, you ask? Oh, my sweet summer child. Pretty. Much. Everyone.
Even environmentalists, bless their tasty hearts, are unaware that oil is refined sequentially. If we somehow, magically, stopped using 43% of it for petrol as we do, we’d still need to extract the same total amount to produce the rest of the diesel, gasses, plastics, jet fuel, and more that we need.
Imagine an unused sea of petrol needing dumping. Damned if you burn it; damned if you dump it. It’s almost as if one would be better off leaving it in the ground. Almost.
Another unsolvable problem
Let’s look at energy return on investment (EROI), the annoying biophysical fact that it takes energy to extract energy regardless of how fat your wallet is; eventually, it becomes impossible to continue. When that happens, everything grinds to a complete halt.
EROI was at 100x back when oil splurted from a simple hole in the ground; these days, it’s down to about 5x for tar sands and 3x for shale oil and falling, as even fossil fuel fans will inconspicuously admit might be a problem.
Fracking and shale oil bought us a few years at obscene environmental and social costs, but the shale oil companies can’t afford to continue much longer. Even with free rein to plunder the Earth, they can't turn a profit.
It's no news that we were always going to fall off the energy cliff sooner or later; the only question is if it happens before we destroy the planet first.
It’s all academic, anyway, because in the meantime our animal, fish & insect populations have plummeted ~70% in fifty years. Did you know? Probably not, due to the shifting baselines effect. Most people are just pleased they don’t have to clear so many bugs off their windscreens anymore, the idea of reading an article concerning the Insect Apocalypse not even crossing their minds.
“If all insects on Earth disappeared, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.” - Jonas Salk
Insects are critical in the decomposition process of all organic matter, crucial to pollinating the crops we depend on, and form the very foundation of Earth’s entire food chain. The disappearance of insects alone is fatal to life on Earth. I wish I didn’t have to explain the painfully obvious, but it seems like I do.
Poison. Poison everywhere.
Our sperm counts have plummeted over 50% in just fifty years. Suddenly, after 300K years as Homo Sapiens, the moment we start polluting our environment with toxins, things start going very wrong with our bodies. What a coincidence!
Microplastics now constitute 0.5% of your brain mass. They are in your organs, testicles, placenta, and unborn babies. Oh, and in a reveal that shocked exactly no one, plastic recycling has been exposed to be yet another complete scam.
Endocrine disrupters abide, non-biodegradable PFAS forever-chemicals are in every drop of water on earth, and toxic chemicals proliferate across the globe.
In court cases of industrial vs. individual rights, judges routinely allow life-ending pollution levels as a necessary evil.
"We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective." - Kurt Vonnegut
We’re dead six ways from Sunday
Most people seem unperturbed by the hyper-accelerated biodiversity loss and the 6th Extinction Event we are causing. (Read Part 1/5: Denial for an introduction as to why).
Species decline cascade as dependencies are broken because the biosphere is a nigh-infinitely complex house of cards: remove or damage a key component, and entire ecosystems collapse (e.g. coral reefs), never to recover on anything remotely relevant to human timescales.
The public is only vaguely aware of the breadth and depth of catastrophic developments in our oceans, each of which alone will eventually end us:
Temperature rise
Acidification
Biodiversity loss
The incoming blue ocean event
The impending AMOC collapse
Sea level rise we simply can’t adapt to
If I missed anything, it really doesn’t matter; we’re dead and buried so many times over it isn’t even funny. There’s probably a reason that marine biologists are the saddest cohort of all climate scientists.
What’s that? How are the 2030 sustainable goals going, you wonder? You’re in luck! There’s a UN report about precisely that! It finds that
Cascading and interlinked crises are putting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in grave danger, along with humanity’s very own survival.” - United Nations
One would think such language bears repeating until we start acting, but apparently, that’s a fringe POV. To be fair, it is rather doomy-gloomy.
I could go on, so I will
Few people have googled planetary boundaries and seen that we are in gross violation of most of them or pondered what the incoming cascade of cataclysmic tipping points will end in — probably because they don’t know what a tipping point is.
What’s a tipping point, you ask? It sounds almost innocent, I know.
It’s not. It’s like when you fall off a cliff to your death.
Thinking is exhausting
We struggle with simple trolley problems, so thinking hard about future lives is way out of our cognitive league. We prefer to pluck arbitrary discounting rates out of thin air - not just about money, but about our actual, real-life grandchildren, too, probably because it's the only way for us to maintain the illusion that we are good people.
Here, riddle me this: does the evilness of planting a landmine on a Girl Scouts hiking trail depend on how many years pass before it gets triggered?
If not, then why are we making an Uninhabitable Earth? Why are we wiping out the possibility for untold numbers of future lives to flourish? Why are we interested in making people happy but indifferent to making happy people?
Welcome to the notoriously unintuitive branch of philosophy called population ethics, where every answer leads to repugnant conclusions. Studying it will make your brain hurt. (Listen to an introduction to Longtermism).
Feeling is easy
It’s because emotions trump rational thought to such a degree that we had to invent the term cognitive biases. Buddha figured this out many centuries ago by taking a very long and honest inward look, and we haven't changed a bit since then, biologically speaking. However, that emotions aren’t rational isn’t entirely accurate, as
“Contrary to popular opinion, feelings aren’t the opposite of rationality; they are evolutionary rationality made flesh” - Yuval Noah Harari
What Yuval is saying is that the limbic system evolved to quickly calculate probabilities of survival and reproduction via a general rule of pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance. Your mammalian brain subconsciously decides what you do via instinctual value judgements, designed to help you skimp on energy-costly cognitive thought processes.
It has worked exceedingly well for countless generations in all of Nature. However, the problem is that the emotional elephant in us is now wielding godlike technology, and it’s gone on a gluttonous spree, a veritable rampage. The excuse-making is left to the rational mind on top, a press secretary delusional enough to think it’s boss.
“Alternative facts”
Speaking of delusional press secretaries, for the love of God, could somebody please wake me up from this post-truth nightmare where truth itself has become a popularity contest, and society is so polarised that we’ve given up even having a conversation?
Without a shared reality, we have nothing.
Seriously, what’s up with right-wingers? They have completely stopped caring about the truth — even democracy itself. The classic Republican has gone extinct.
This quote from a frustrated vent is nine years old, but some things never change.
“Though we love to think that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, at a certain point this becomes insanity. At a certain point, in regard to things like climate change, it becomes suicide to be tolerant of opposing beliefs for the simple fact that this is a thing that imperils the entire planet. It's like we're in a car heading off of a cliff, but instead of debating how we solve the problem of dying in a fiery crash — asking each other meaningful questions like Do we slam on the brakes, Will there be time to stop, Should we just jump out and tuck and roll — we are arguing whether or not we are even in a moving vehicle... It's infuriating.
The real tragedy in all of this is that the same folks who are arguing against mountains of scientific data also want their opinion heard on issues like gun control, income inequality, voting rights, or sending our troops to war. It begs the question that if they could be so obtuse, so devastatingly wrong, about something so blatantly obvious and scientifically verifiable, why should we listen to them when it comes to other matters of public policy? If these people would put profits before the environment, or an ecosystem so increasingly fragile, one without which the very existence of life on earth is threatened, how can they be trusted to make any other important decisions?” - Jim Patnoudes
I think he raises a fair point. Maybe a blatant denial of facts should disqualify your opinion? Maybe you should be sent to your room to think about your attitude?
Dream on. The US is about to re-elect a non-stop lying demagogue denialist for President, a man who speaks and thinks and acts like a child and who almost all adults outside the US effortlessly dismiss at a glance. In my moderately sane country of Denmark, he enjoys a 4% approval rating, presumably including all 3% of our population hardwired to be sociopaths.
Meanwhile, the world looks on in horror as a large minority aims to mould the superpower nation into something truly grotesque: Project 2025.
I’m not saying the overly woke left is a whole lot better. I think Trump is a symptom of a vastly greater problem of utter cultural decay, but that’s a collapse-related topic for historians of the future to ponder — if there’s anyone left.
Speaking personally, it was when I witnessed a generation that grew up on the wholesome Mr. Rogers begin devouring The Jerry Springer Show I realised something was very, very rotten in the US of A.
Back to much bigger problems than a decaying USA
The civilisation-sustaining AMOC is precipitously slowing down, threatening an imminent collapse. The worst potential happening since The Black Death makes headlines in mainstream media, spelling out how we might all die soon, and nobody I know seems to care.
We're talking a three-foot sea level rise on the US East Coast and a 10-15 degrees Celsius drop in temperatures in Europe if it happens, worsening to up to -35c in some regions within a century as the Arctic ice creeps down below Britain. The southern hemisphere would suffer calamitously also.
“A lot of discussion is, how should agriculture prepare for this. But a collapse of the AMOC is a going-out-of-business scenario for European agriculture. You cannot adapt to this.” - Peter Ditlevsen, Niels Bohr Institute
People have no idea that aerosols have been insulating us from a lot of the heat. We are trying to quit that Faustian Bargain, so they will find out real soon — the hard way.
Instead of paying attention to arguably the most important question in human history— how in God’s name we are going to make it — they choose wilful ignorance regarding how high levels of CO2 always cause mass extinctions. They’re not sure what methane really is and have no idea what the permafrost's gradual thawing will entail. Instead, they gossip about celebrities.
Like the factory farms they gladly turn a blind eye to, they ignore how our insatiable hunger for beef and soy is wiping out the entire Amazon rainforest, a place we used to call the Lungs of the World. Diagnosis? Terminal.
Ocean temperatures are off the charts to such a degree that scientists are running out of extreme adjectives to describe it, setting daily records for a year and counting. On land, we’ve been setting all-time heat records monthly for 14 months and counting. Anyone can extend those graphs into the future to see where it all ends; very few choose to.
There was a wonderful Facebook group called “Conservatives Approaching the Point” with a screenshot of someone saying, “Hottest month ever? You say that every month!” — but FB censorship quickly took care of that.
FB routinely ignores reports about my dead relatives' identities being abused for phishing attempts but quickly censors anything that makes you throw your phone away in disgust. Depending on your goals, that might make a lot of sense, which is probably why Dana Meadows mentions the word 36 times in her brilliant article Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.
The list goes on and on
Topsoil erosion & degradation alone is enough to end us, as we’ll struggle to grow food in just a few decades because the soil we need for that is both dead and gone.
Crucial resources dwindle away to nothing (freshwater, rubber, sand, fertiliser, rare metals and more). Yes, even sand, the irreplaceable resource we need for cement, glass and asphalt, the backbones of modern civilisation.
Two billion people depend on water from rapidly disappearing glaciers in Asia: “The consequences of climate change in these mountains are impossible to overstate”. Are you ready for a billion climate refugees?
These are but some of the predicaments; the list could easily go on (deforestation, overfishing, growing antibiotic resistance, vector-borne diseases, and how 1200ppm CO2 levels may eventually prevent cloud formation itself, plunging us directly into a hothouse Earth that ends all mammalian life), but I imagine you’re getting weary, so I better start wrapping it up.
“Problems have solutions. Predicaments have outcomes.” - Nate Hagens
If you quiz anyone you know about the above predicaments, you will find that they are completely unaware of most of them.
They also won’t want to know, and they certainly won’t want to talk about it.
Try it if you want. It's positively maddening.
This is why I think it's fair to say that NOBODY KNOWS and NOBODY CARES.Most of the above issues are lethal to us, being unsolvable as they are due to simple ecological realities and the uncompromising laws of physics. Our hardwired psychological traits and shortcomings sealed our fates long ago, as we simply did not evolve biologically to wield such power. Finally, we can’t escape the modern societal traps of living we have fallen into for systemic and game-theoretical reasons.
The fundamental issue is Overshoot: humanity living above Earth’s carrying capacity, the combined result of overpopulation multiplied by overconsumption per capita. With large discrepancies between countries, obviously; it’s those of us consuming the most per capita that need to dial down the most. We just don’t want to. So there.
“The American way of life is not negotiable.” - George W. Bush
— WALL OF TEXT ALERT —
Apart from the list of civilisation-ending predicaments above, we also face calamitous issues such as (deep breath) how language itself has abandoned the realm of rationality in a reversal of The Enlightenment itself, galloping inequality that will culminate in mass deaths one way or the other, the imminent demographic implosions of China, Japan and Germany (for starters), how the growing Global South will understandably do everything they can to match the Global North’s overconsumption rates, the enrage-to-engage attention economy with its associated catastrophic effects on mental health among youth and adults alike (not to mention how it by its very design consumes as much as possible of our most valuable resource of all: time), how the largest social experiment humankind has ever run has plunged us into filter bubbles and echo-chambers we mistake for reality, the rampant rise of mis- and disinformation in the political sphere, the possible collapse of the online sphere when AI pollution and increasingly easily produced deepfakes soon begin flooding it, how our modern super-stimuli foods & drugs are causing the obesity & opioid epidemics, current & imminent breadbasket failures and the coming hyperinflated food prices, the predictable rise of fascism and authoritarianism that always comes with the fall of nations, how the US is likely to stop patrolling and thus policing our oceans, resulting in uninsurable freighters and a complete halt to shipping spurring rapid deglobalisation, the singularity that will occur when the US inevitably eventually defaults on its endless, accelerating national debt and the global reserve currency therefore collapses (that’s when the US actually does build a wall), the inevitable social & political unrest from rising stressors as everything begins to crumble, the most serious being the sooner-or-later guaranteed outcome of rolling the dice on an annual 1% risk of nuclear war (the low range estimate among most experts), not to mention other existential risks such as inevitable future pandemics we refuse to prepare for in the name of efficiency (incl. the rising ease of engineering them in a basement; the best prevention understood to be the abandonment of the entire notion of privacy), the increasing deadliness of automated killing machines (yet another arms race), the threat of quantum computers breaking all cryptography, space debris making putting satellites into orbit increasingly difficult, and suchlike. Throw in the imminent AI singularity via AGI for good measure if you’re on that bus; I’m not, but even without it, AI is a technology and all technologies we invent simply serve to accelerate us off the cliff.
To name but a few. No wonder the Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight than ever.
I don’t blame you for skipping the wall of text. I included it to impart a feeling of overwhelm. (Sorry).
Nobody knows and nobody cares
An exaggeration, of course. Legions of people care. In fact, most people are concerned about climate change. Some people devote their entire lives to fighting it.
It’s just that, as a generalising comment, it is pretty accurate — and not only because two billion adults have never even heard of climate change. It’s because, as a whole, we are racing right off a cliff as if we don’t know and don’t care. And it’s way too late to prevent it now. The damage is done; the incoming changes are already baked in. We could shut everything off globally, and temperatures would continue to rise for decades because we’ve put a lid on a planet boiling with heat from the sun. That’s how physical realities work. That’s why it’s called being Collapse Aware.
We’re not going to all come together on this. All the stressors will compound, and mankind will revert to baser natures. The descent will be horrifying, and highly unjust, with the growing threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over us as increasingly desperate nations eventually face the choice of either plundering their neighbours or thirsting to death, an impossible dilemma for anyone.
“There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy” - Alfred Henry Lewis
The thing is, we’re already doing the equivalent of nuking the oceans a dozen times a second. Our oceans absorb 90% of our heat gains, and can soon absorb no more. We are cooking Earth with the equivalent of 378 million nukes a year. How does one even do that?
Well, we found a way.
Imagine what that would look like — the sheer fireworks show. Imagine sitting on some paradise atoll somewhere, observing an endless cacophony of nuclear bombs detonating around you, ad nauseam et ad infinitum, until the oceans are dead and the planet is on fire. That’s the result of Business As Usual. That’s our plan. That is, apparently, what we want to do.
I’m sorry, but this isn’t Sparta. This is madness.
Eventually, in the not-so-distant future, we will reach a 4-degree temperature rise. That’s the same difference between today and the last ice age. And it’s all downhill from there.
“As a climate scientist, I’m often asked if I’m optimistic or pessimistic about the future. My honest answer is that I’m terrified. We are heading for a world that will be unrecognisable and likely unsurvivable for billions of people.” - Peter Kalmus
It took a desperate, clear-seeing, autistic, innocent child to cry out that the emperors are not only naked but are conspiring to eat us, spurring 4500 demonstrations in over 150 countries.
Unfortunately,
“Demonstrations are parties. People party and then go home. Nothing changes.” ― The Ministry for the Future
If you would like others to lay their eyes on this post, please like or share it. It really pushes it in the algorithms. This is a free blog. Thank you :o)Read Collapse - Part 1/5: Denial
Read Collapse - Part 2/5: Depression
Read Collapse - Part 4/5: Bargaining
(To come) Part 5 of 5: Acceptance
Three years ago, I decided to start investigating our plight because of "doomers" and climate scientists I met or became aware of on Twitter. I started with a bias, even as a teen 50 years ago I felt the insanity and unsustainability of the world we have created. My research and writing has found much of the same as yours, so I can appreciate the amount of time and understanding that went into this essay. Some days I ask why I persist. The outcome, whatever the details of the scenario, are cast. I suppose I do it because once your eyes are open, they can never close and as a way of processing grief. I'm well into the acceptance phase at this point. I'm glad to find solace in meeting others the world over who live in realty recognize our situation.
Gosh, this brilliantly captures the harsh truth that we've been conditioned to ignore. It’s chilling to think that we’ve been kicking the can down the road for so long, leaving future (and current) generations to face the fallout. It’s a stark reminder of how deeply entrenched our denial is—and how urgently we need to break from it.