The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Environment Page 1 of 14

Principles Of The Green Age After The Collapse: #1

Do as thou will, so long as you increase biodiversity and biomass, reduce pollution and heat, and replace any resources used.

Want to live in the howling wilderness? OK. But only if you can increase the number and amount of lifeforms, and reduce pollution by being there. If you can’t do all three, you don’t get to live in the wilderness.

Freedom today is based on money. If you have enough money, you can do what you want, if you obey the law. The more money you have, the fewer laws apply to you: either they are laws which if violated are punished with fines, which you don’t care about, or they are laws which are effectively not enforced against the rich.

The Green Age, instead of having a zero tolerance policy for minor infractions, will have no tolerance for people who damage the ecosphere or the climate.

Likewise, you will need to replace the resources you’re using if you’re using them beyond any natural replacement rate. If you’re taking water from a river or an aquifer, you’ll have an amount you can use that is equal to natural replenishment. If you use any more, you’ll need to replace it. Chop trees, plant them, and since you also need to maintain biomass and biodiversity, that won’t mean tree farms and will require you to keep doing it and, most likely, to have done it in the past. (This will make clear-cutting very rare.)

This also means that you don’t get to do what you want if you use non-renewable resources. Mining and other forms of permanent extraction will be something that society has a strict limit on. Much will be assigned by government, and much will likely be divided and given to each member of society and when they buy something which uses a non-renewable resource, that account will be debited, with no credit except in life-saving emergencies.

The principle is simple: replace what you use if it can be replaced, make the ecology and the environment better because of your existence and use limited amounts of non-renewable resources. This is how we fix the environment and make an environment is healthier and far more enjoyable to live in. (Just as almost everyone wants to live on a street with lots of trees.)

Long term, if you want to use a lot of non-renewable resources, we will have to go into space, but taking masses from Earth will be verboeten.

These rules will apply to individuals and groups, including whatever replaces corporations as our primary private economic vehicle and to households. This will lead to the end of suburbs and exurbs as we know them. Most people will either be rural (working on food production and environmental projects) or will live in dense cities. If we want the privilege of living in low population density areas, we will have to earn it by figuring out how to do so in a way that doesn’t decrease biodiversity, biomass or renewable resources, and instead of those who make more money being allowed to do more, those who will be allowed to do more will be those who increase those environmental variables the most.

This is only the first of the Green Age articles, we’ll dive into the rest of the principles and some of the details of how such a society must be run as the series continues.

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Climate Change and Environmental Collapse (State of the World 2023 #2)

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

I’m going to keep this one brief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Political v.s Physical Tipping Points

Back in the 2000’s I belonged to the Netroots movement. Our mantra was “more, better democrats.” We ran primaries, fundraised and put pressure on politicians, on top of all the normal blogging stuff, much of which we were the first mass practitioners of.

We failed. Obama was our loss moment, as he bypassed us and was able to get our readers without having to appease us.

But Obama was something more important. The financial crisis of 2007-9 was a moment which would have allowed for radical change. An FDR figure could have changed the nature of America in their response to it, breaking up banks and other monopolies and letting a vast swathe of the rich go bankrupt and charging them with crimes, thus breaking their power for generations to come.

Obama didn’t do that. He didn’t even seriously consider it, instead he supported the Federal Reserve and Treasury in saving them and enriching them.

I considered it then, and now, a political tipping point. The financial crisis was the last real political chance to change the direction of society, globally (since an American response would have cascaded throughout the world, as it did), enough to perhaps stave off climate change and ecological collapse, since politically dealing with those required breaking the power of the wealthy.

The most important political tipping point was actually the neoliberal empowerment moment: 79’s election of Thatcher and 80’s election of Reagan. Clinton and Blair ascending to the top of the Democrats and Labor were the second political points, since each of them institutionalized the changes made by their Republican/Conservative predecessors. Thatcher understood well, noting that her victory was sealed by Blair.

For both climate change and ecological collapse to be stopped, for the physical tipping points to be avoided, we had to make a radical change in how we ran our societies. Continuing on more or less as we had before meant disaster. To be sure, the changes necessary were truly radical (though less so the sooner they were begun), but nonetheless they required political victory and destruction of the power of vested interests.

So while others were saying “we still have time”, I was looking at the politics and the realities of power and saying the opposite, “it’s too late, we missed the window”, because there was no political possibility.

The physical tipping point for climate change was reached this year or last year, I’m reasonably sure. The ecological collapse tipping point may have been somewhat earlier. The civilization collapse point has also probably passed, and I put that around 2020.

All along the road off-turns were offered. People laugh at Dennis Kucinich, but he wanted to do the right things and ran in the Democratic primaries multiple times. The fact that he was considered laughable even though his policy prescriptions were correct is exactly the problem.

While Corbyn came too late to turn the tide, his election and success, if it had been the precursor of serious political realignment, as was Thatcher, could have saved hundreds of millions of lives and made the process much less painful. Indeed his defeat is one reason (though only one) that I consider 2020 the turning point for civilization collapse. It was definitely the turning point for UK collapse.

Modern propaganda is mighty indeed, and Corbyn lacked the necessary ruthlessness to defeat entrenched interests, if it was even possible. Unlike Obama, however, he at least wished to do the right things.

And that’s the main point: whoever runs society must want to do the right thing. Physically we had plenty of time, if you look at it from back in the 70s, which is when I first became concerned as a child.

Politically, though, we did not have lots of time. Changes in ruling sub-ideologies and opportunities to break the power of elites are not that common, and we failed to do so at each possible political tipping point.

And so, here we are.


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Declining Population Thru Lower Birth Rates Is GOOD, Mmmmkay?

Alright, let’s cover this again, with a bit more explication, since the idiots are really doubling down on “oh no, decreasing population.”

If you want to see it on a map, here goes:

Even India has dropped to about replacement rate.

Now, let’s deal with this.

First, to the extent the plummet in birth rates is because of decreased biological fertility, like reduced sperm counts, it’s bad.

Second, despite this, we are well over the world’s carrying capacity and you are seeing it in the collapse of other life forms (ecological collapse) and climate change.

Third: the world’s carrying capacity is variable in a sense: what matters is number of people times the average per capita carrying cost of each person.

Fourth: the more population we want to have, the lower our per capita carrying costs have to be.

Fifth: a lot of people whine about this and to a certain extent rightly so. It is associated with austerity.

Sixth: imagine a world in which you bought a phone and used it for 20 years with modular upgrades; a car and used it for 50 (with modular upgrades); a washer and dryer and used it for 75 years, and where all of those things, when they finally ended their lives, were carefully recycled as much as possible.

Imagine a world in which almost nothing was made out of plastic. (In the 70s almost all bottles were glass and we used paper bags and grocery items were not individually wrapped in plastic and fuck “germs!” Covid has proven we don’t really care about that.)

Imagine a world in which we work half as much, create stuff that lasts for decades or even half a century or more.

Seventh: “but how can we afford this?” We can afford anything we can actually physically do. Each individual item would be more expensive, but last far longer and be cheaper overall. Yes, we would have to change how we distribute permission to have things, but we need to do that already.

Eighth: even in capitalist terms the “oh, without population gain how can we have economic growth” stuff is incoherent. Capitalism is supposed to increase productivity massively, so you should still be able to have growth, certainly per-capita growth. If you can’t, you’re a bad capitalist.

Ninth: that particular issue is related to oligarchs wanting to funnel all the money upwards and instead of relying on customers, rely on government, including central bank, subsidies. (Neither Tesla nor SpaceX would have made it without massive government subsidies.) In actual capitalism capitalists want high wages, because “everyone else’s employees are my customers.” The cost of high wages is more than made up for by people being able to afford their goods. This is why the economy of the post-war era was so good: high wages and lots of consumptiong.

Tenth: of course this sort of capitalism has to go away, we can’t afford a planned obsolesence economy in a world over carrying capacity and with limited stocks of key resources (the way we’re burning thru lithium should be literally criminal). But even in capitalist terms “oh no, population decrease” is an admission of failure.

Eleven: the dependency ratio is how many working people are supporting non-working (old, young, disabled and not allowed to work) people. Yes, a lower ratio makes things harder, but again, productivity is what matters and capitalism keeps claiming it’s good at raising productivity. Plus the actual percentage of people working for wages in high prosperity periods has often actually been lower than in high prosperity periods.

Twelve: oh, and worker compensation is likely to go up as population decreases and as the carry ratio decreases (or at least, be higher than it would have been otherwise, civilization collapse is also in the mix.) After the black death, welfare increased massively. We’re already seeing some of this effect due to the pandemic (one of the only good things to come out of it.)

***

We need less population. The world’s population has over doubled just in my lifetime (I’m 55). That’s ridiculous. And minus the internet and a few good medical improvements, I’ll tell you that life wasn’t worse then. (Even Africa had higher growth rates in the 50s and 60s and the dire poverty numbers are bullshit, because subsistence farming was far more common, but that’s another article.)

We have no problems we can’t adapt to, minus a few scenarios like the Venus runaway, a full ecological collapse which eliminates the apex species (that’s us) or polluting the world so much we can’t survive (which includes nuclear war.)  We can, in theory and even in practice, if our politics wasn’t so screwed up, even make most people better off at the same time. But it will take time, and the most important problems are made simpler by population reductions.

What is going to make everything harder, actually, is our refusal to deal with Covid and our “New Emperor’s Clothes” insistence on pretending it’s over, while it continues as a mass disabling event. Yeah, we can handle a lower dependency ratio, but crippling hundreds of millions of people and making hundreds of millions more sicker is an unnecessary self-inflicted wound.

As before, as so far always in this crisis, the most important thing we have to do is replace our leadership class: political and private, en-masse, so that the correct decisions can be made. And yes, capitalism as we understand it is going to have to go away.

But this weird idea that population reduction right now is bad is breathtakingly stupid, and people who believe it have been fooled, or are fools


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The Simplest Thing You Need To Understand About Climate Change

The amount of warming is based primarily on how much CO2 there is in the atmosphere.

This is what is known as a STOCK. Think of it like the water in a sink.

The amount of climate change gases we are putting into the atmosphere is a FLOW. Think of it as the net amount of water going into the sink.

So, when you read an article talking about how much gas is being produced, if it says that amount is going down, what that means is that warming is still increasing.

If we want to reduce the amount of warming, we have to get to a negative amount of gasses going into the pool; into the stock. The flow needs to be negative, like turning off the water and pulling the plug.

Unfortunately, and that is what I’ve been concerned by, at a certain point, stored climate change gasses start being released. Methane in the permafrost and in swamps, for example. Once the permafrost areas heat up enough, methane which has been kept out of the stock and flows starts flowing into the pool.

This is a flow we have only indirect control over and it makes it much harder to get to a negative flow or even slow the increase of the stock.

So, if we ever want the old world back we’re going to have to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere or take other radical steps like orbital mirrors which reflect sunlight so there’s less incoming heat.

Removing CO2 is HARD. It’s not an easy problem and many of the ways of doing it, like ocean seeding, may cause other problems. As with a lot of problems, the easiest way to deal with it was not to let it occur in the first place.

It’s too late to do that.


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Preparing For Collapse During Collapse

As regular readers know my judgment is that we are now into civilization collapse. It’s slow right now, and it will be stop and start, but it will continue and pick up speed over time.

That means that you should be preparing for collapse to get worse, including climate change and ecological collapse.

Civilizations rise and fall, that’s normal, and ecological collapse commonly happens at the same time, but what’s unusual right now is that we have a world system which is global, and thus is collapsing all at once, and we have a global ecological collapse.

So it’s going to be bad. Very bad.

Still, there are things to be done.

The most important thing is to make and sustain social ties. The people who do best in collapses are those whom other people like and need. Join a church if you can stomach it (and there are churches which come with little theological baggage, for atheists.) Make friends with your neighbours and join groups. Be liked.

If you have family you can stand or good friends, consider communal living. An extended household will often do better than a person alone or a nuclear family, being both cheaper and having more ability to take care of itself and its members.

Get some skills: basic maintainence abilities will be worth a lot: electrical, plumbing, minor repairs, etc…

Figure out a way to grow some of your own food, or set up a relationship with local farmers, ideally one that is a trade of your abilities for their food. Back in the Great Depression one friend’s father was a lawyer, and he did the legal work for a lot of farms and they kept  him fed.

Gardens are so-so. Climate change is going to make outdoor gardening very uncertain. If you can, create something with climate control, ideally a green house and figure out a way to keep it cooled when necessary. You can do this in your house too, by replacing some walls and part of the roof with a transparent material, ideally with some form of shutters. If you have a flat roof, and it’s load bearing, you can put your green house up there.

Do something about water. Lack of water will kill you faster than anything but temperature and lack of oxygen. Some sort of storage system and ability to gather rain water is one possibility. If you’re somewhere humid, dehumidifiers of the right type can produce enough water for drinking. Get some sort of purification system, something simple.

Power is going to be an issue. Solar panels have a limited lifespan and so do batteries, but they’re better than nothing. You want to be able to provide power for a couple weeks and/or during brown outs — if power will be out hours every day due to rationing, you need to be able to handle that. Some form of non-panel solar is a good idea: research heat engines and see if you can figure out how to store energy mechanically by raising water or physical objects or some other way.

Temperature control is another obvious issue, and figuring out  how to stay cool is important. As heat rises, public power will become less reliable at exactly the times you need it, so the power equation above is important.

If there are local violent authories, whether government (police/military) or non-government (gangs) make sure they like you. Become friends with their leaders if possible. As civilization breaks down, be part of whatever replaces them in certain areas. (Like in Iraq, where various militias and mosques took over.

In general, though, understand that supply chains are going to become more and more unreliable. Get the tech you need as soon as possible, and make it tech that is durable and/or easy to maintain. Buy spare parts and take training so that you can fix your own equipment, which will also make you valuable to your neighbours.

Learn how to make certain simple medicines if you can: basic antibiotics are not hard to make and the same is true of the sulfa drugs. If you can do this, you’re golden, because you’ll be able to help other people and you will be valuable to them.

Medical systems, especially public ones will become more and more unreliable and less and less available to people who aren’t on the inside. Take care of as many medical issues as you can right now. I like to joke that it’s a good thing I got cancer now, because in 10 years I’m not sure I’d have gotten care soon enough. You can’t schedule something like cancer, but you can make sure whatever problems  you have now are dealt with.

Taper off drugs you use all the time if that’s possible. For some, like insulin, you’re out of luck (but should look into how to get an alternative supply), but for many other drugs, tapering now rather than being forced to go cold turkey is advisable IF it’s medically appropriate.

Take action as soon as possible. The more money you have, of course, the easier this will be, but if you don’t have money there are still things you can do, like joining local maker clubs, churches and organizations. If you have extra money do use some of your money to prepare: money will become less valuable as time goes by.

We’re on the downward slope now. If you want to survive, or to have a decent life, take whatever steps you can.


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Quick Takes 5: The Year Climate Change Became Undeniable

Only someone ignorant, stupid or on the payroll could deny climate change before 2023, but this is the year where to remain in denial you have to be 5-sigma stupid or on the payroll.

So, boys and girls, let’s look at some of the highlights of what will be one of the coldest years of the rest of your life.

Let’s start with Antarctic sea ice extent. Remember, this is during WINTER.

For years I’ve said that marine inundation (sea level rises) would happen before most people expect it. And I’ll be right.

Next, we have more winter fun. 35 degrees celcius in Chile.

Well, that seems… bad.

Now for the lovely long-term view:

What’s super about the aboe graph, is that I’ll lay you 4:1 it is over-optimistic. By a lot.

There’s a vast amount of delusion about how bad global warming will be. People talk about 1.5 C, or 2 C, or 3 C.

How about +10C as the equilibrium? This is from a pre-print, but it’s not unreasonable:

Equilibrium global warming for today’s GHG level is 10°C for our central estimate

Now, the guys who made the above estimate are on the gloom side and as they themselves say, blackballed, but everyone who’s been paying attention knows that essentially everything has been coming in sooner and worse than expected. Are you going to bet on the consensus forecasts made for politicians that have consistently under-estimated climate change?

Yeah.

Next we have Farmer’s Insurance leaving Florida. The time when home owners insurance won’t be available anywhere unless the government underwrites it is withing sight.

Ocean water is warming up. In the more tropical areas it’s destroying coral, but it’s damn impressive in the north, too:

Spain, July 7th.

My guess is that most of the Mediterranean area will not be inhabitable during the summer in ten to twenty years. If you don’t have air conditioning, you will die.

Then there’s the whole “jellyfish future”:

Oxygen levels in the world’s oceans have already dropped more than 2 per cent between 1960 and 2010, and they are expected to decline up to seven per cent below the 1960 level over the next century. Some patches are worse than others — the top of the northeast Pacific has lost more than 15 per cent of its oxygen. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2019 special report on the oceans, from 1970 to 2010, the volume of “oxygen minimum zones” in the global oceans — where big fish can’t thrive but jellyfish can — increased by between three and eight per cent.

I for one welcome the ocean’s new Jellyfish overlords.

We’ll talk more about the implications of all this soon, including the implications for you personally.


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Permafrost Tipping Point Almost Certainly Reached

As regular readers will know, for a long time I’ve emphasized what are now being called tipping points, and in particular the tipping point where permafrost melt becomes self sustaining. As a matter of politics, I’ve been quite sure this would occur, since we aren’t likely to do anything about it.

One model shows that the tipping point is already past. If we were to stop all emissions today, it would still happen and temperatures would still rise.

It’s possible this model is wrong on the margins, but I’d be rather surprised if it’s wrong on the fundamentals. The danger has always been passing the point where humanity was in the driver’s seat. We started global warming climate change, but we can no longer stop it short of, perhaps, some hail-mary geo-engineering.

Back in 2009 I said that runaway climate change was a sure thing, not because I thought then that the tipping point had been reached, but because it was clear that we were close to the tipping point and that politicians were not going to take action. I considered the 2008 election the last chance, Obama was elected and he was a disaster: not only didn’t he take the action needed, he vastly increased fracking, something he is very proud of, having said “that was me!”

Let’s run quickly thru what this means.

Water shortages in large areas of the world. We’ve depleted and poisoned the aquifers too. This is going to be ugly: most of the American southwest, large chunks of China and India, huge areas of Africa, and more. I’ve written about this many times, this is a 100% certainty.

Actual Famines. Right now we produce way more food than we need. We won’t continue doing so. The first famines will be distributional famines, but by 2050-60 at the latest there will be real subcontinental scarcity famines. Obesity isn’t going to be an issue for much longer, maybe 20 years.

Massive Refugee Crises. Like nothing we’ve every seen. Borders will be SHUT and refugees will be shot. I figure the best candidate for the first one that involves tens of millions of refugees in a short period is Bangladesh/India. And I give 50/50 odds the Indians will shoot a lot of them.

Supply Chain Cascade Failures. We’re already seeing this. We’re past the tipping point on economic collapse as well, though it will be quite uneven. My favorite current failure is that there’s a shortage of Siracha hot sauce, and there’s nothing that can be done about it because there aren’t enough materials to make it with.

This issue has a lot more causes than climate change, but climate change doesn’t help.

Ecological Collapse. The birds, the bees, the insects: they’re all dying and when their populations collapse, we’re going to be in a world of hurt. This is why I usually say “climate change and environmental collapse.” Some of this stuff is really scary, like the possibility of a collapse of the phytoplankton in the ocean which produce about 30% of our annual oxygen.

Large Chunks of the World Being To Hot To Live In. Yeah, sorry. At first it’ll just be in the summer, but in time it’ll be most of the year.

Will Spain, northern Africa and the southern Med even be inhabitable in the summer in ten to twenty years? The only solution would appear to be a ton of solar and/or nuclear and a lot of air conditioning, but you can’t farm in these temperatures, heck this is approaching wet bulb death temperatures.

Riots, Revolutions, Warlordism, etc… Yeah, sorry, when the famines and no water and heat and so on get bad, people will not sit there and just die and countries will break up. I would expect, in about 30 years or so, for half the world’s countries to be essentially descended into warlordism. In fifty years, 70% or so.

All of this was preventable, we knew in time and knew what to do and did not do any of it.

As a species we are responsible, but the people who are most responsible have names and addresses. One of the requirements of handling climate change and ecological collapse in the best way will be to remove them all from power, take everything they have, and throw them in prison for the remainder of their lives. They can be permitted to have no power and everyone must understand see that they did not benefit from their evil.


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