Category: Civilization Collapse Page 1 of 2

We’ve had a couple posts recently on collapse. One, by Nate Wilcox, on the possibility of civil war and a another by commenter Grim Jim on just how many people would die in a civilization collapse.

Let’s take a look at the dimensions of collapse.

First is slow vs. fast. John Michael Greer tends to push slow, though his position is more nuanced than that. In the slow collapse things just keep getting shittier, with, perhaps, some break points. (If there’s a civil war, there’s a big jump in crap.) In this model it’s hard to say exactly when the collapse happens. When did the Western Roman Empire fall? There are easily half a dozen possible dates one could argue for, and that’s a collapse complete with a barbarian invasion.

In general expect countries which can feed and fuel themselves to be in the slow collapse bucket, though there’ll be exceptions, especially if they can’t defend themselves. Canada is one of those, if it isn’t invaded by America, which it probably will be. Russia is also in it, if they don’t wind up in a nuclear war.

Remember that modern agriculture will be affected by collapse: heavy use of fertilizer, pesticides and oils makes it vulnerable. So if a country appears to have a massive surplus, well, it may not. When AMOC ends and Europe loses ten degrees celcius overnight, they may as well.

The same here is true of water: when glaciers finish melting and most snow pack is gone, there’s going to be a lot less of it. So look at where the surplus food and water is coming from.

Second is distribution by time and place. Everyone likes to quote Gibson, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” Some countries have already collapsed. Sri Lanka, for example. Others are further along the path: in the first world, Britain’s a good example. Within countries some places collapse first: Northern England is notably a hole. Catholic Belfast has never not been poor, and so on.

In the US there are places where we can be sure of regional collapse—as Sean-Paul pointed out to me, the Texas triangle is just going to run out of water in a couple decades. The American Southwest is doomed for pretty much the same reason.

As for that, the homelessness epidemic shows that for many Americans, the collapse is already here.

Internationally Bangladesh will be one of the first high-population countries to collapse. Among major countries, India will be one of the first. The Europeans can go any time when the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Current (AMOC) ends: and that’s due sometime in the next 50 years, as a “when not if” proposition. I don’t know Africa well enough, but obviously multiple countries there are already close to collapse and the only thin which could put that off would be concerted efforts by China (financially and developmentally) and Russia (food and resource aid.)

China’s a hard one to predict: they have huge climate change vulnerabilities, especially to flooding in the North, heat in the North and water in general. On the other hand, if they play it smart they have the world’s industrial base and the best chance of adaptation and mitigation, especially due to their alliance with Russia, which will keep them in resources and food longer than otherwise. Since Russia mutually benefits, they’ll keep the Chinese topped up as a priority.

Which leads to the bigger point: when food starts getting scarce countries will stop exporting, and this is when food importing countries will start real collapse (and food riots, and civil war.)

As for water scarcity, that’s when you’ll get water wars.

And both will exacerbate any internal tensions. When there’s not enough to eat or drink, the “other” whoever that is, is likely to get it in the neck. Countries with significant internal rifts, like India between Hindus and Muslims/High and Low-Caste will see incredible violence and mass murder of minorities. Whether that also describes America is a question much debated, but at the least there will be a vast increase in discrimination and at the worst purges or even civil war.

In Europe there will be huge backlashes against visible minorities, especially Muslim ones and perhaps also Jews, as they are tarred with genocide and accusations of controlling governments.

I would suggest to expect a general pattern of slow decline punctuated by cliff-drops. Things will slowly get shittier, then suddenly get a lot shittier. To give a small example, in Ontario where I live, before Covid you could expect to be seen in an emergency department within a couple hours and to get an MRI or CT scan within a couple months, often a few weeks. Now it takes ten to twelve hours to be seen in an emergency (unless you’re obviously bleeding out or can’t breathe) and imaging tests can take six to nine months.

In collapse some foods (starting with imported ones) will go from widely available to just not on the shelf. Medicines which are imported will stop being available, again in slow decline then suddenly, almost impossible to find.

Slow, then precipitous, then slow, then precipitous.

The general prescription here, for small groups and individuals is to make yourself as independent of the grid as possible, to figure out how to grow climate controlled food, and to find a water source. Even in slow collapse models there will be large numbers of brownouts, water will be shitty if available (hello England) and so on. If you can’t handle at least a few hours or days off-grid, life will be miserable.

Collapse isn’t a disaster movie, though there are parts of it that are. (All the people made homeless by wildfires know this, and there will be coastal inundations). Rather it’s a series of long slide, punctuated by catastrophes

My writing happens because readers donate or subscribe. If you value that writing, and you can afford to, please support it.

These are elevated comments by GrimJim.

What’s useful about this is that the estimates are made explicit. — Ian

And Elevated Comment two (on farms and food)

Ian – all this assumes a hard collapse as opposed to a slow withering. But that scenario is entirely possibly with hard enough shocks, and we’re doing almost everything we can to ensure they happen.

Joe Biden is responsible for a genocide in Israel, because Israel couldn’t do it without American support. (And this isn’t his only mass murder. He engineered a famine in Afghanistan.)

Obama said that he and Joe were responsible for making the US the biggest oil and gas producer in the world. Biden has, in office as President, made that brag too, meaning he owns it.

He is also responsible for all the deaths in Ukraine since March of last year, when the US, thru the UK PM Boris Johnson, scuttled a peace deal. As a result, Ukraine will almost certainly wind up losing much more land and hundreds of thousands more dead. Most likely it will wind up a landlocked nation. The IMF and the EU will then loot it to the ground with neoliberal policies.

Never let the US use you as their proxy in a war. They always fuck you over.

Biden also has overseen the institutionalization of a permanent pandemic without instituting proper mitigations. The official numbers are a vast under-count, since they only count reported deaths and most jurisdictions no longer report Covid deaths. This before we get to Long Covid. Joe now owns that, and that will be tens of millions disabled Americans and early deaths and hundreds of millions. I’ll do a post on some numbers on how many children are getting it soon. It always amuses me how Americans and Europeans go on and on about how much they love their children, when every piece of evidence indicates the exact opposite. (Regular readers will recall how I wrote, again and again, not to send children back to school till proper ventilation and filtering was put in place. Billions for weapons, none for protecting your kids.)

As for the US economic numbers, they are fake, because inflation is vastly understated and anyone who pretends otherwise is an economist, an idiot, or on the payroll—and often all three, since being an economist or believing in economic models is the equivalent of being hit repeatedly in the head by Muhammad Ali in his prime.

Joe accelerated the trade war with China started by Trump. As a result, China will become the world leader in microchips, which they were not pursuing before the sanctions. Within 2 to 3 years they will cause a microchip glut on everything the but high end chips They will, within 10 years, be the world leaders in auto production and within 15 years, the world leaders in civic aviation.

Sanctions against Russia have failed and Russia’s economy is growing fast. It is now larger than Germany’s and far healthier in the ways that will matter as things get worse.

Joe’s policies in Ukraine and Europe are leading to German de-industrializing. Europe is doomed, in so many ways. When AMOC goes, and models are showing that could happen as soon as next year (though I don’t expect it quite that soon), well, European agriculture will collapse, and there will be famine and a huge wave of refugees out of Europe. The irony will be deep. I wonder if Russia and Africa will accept many European refugees.

(The industrial movement makes no real difference to climate change, it’s just moving production from place to place but it is going to hurt almost every country which is an ally of America.)

And humans wonder why they live in Hell.

It’s because we deserve it, at least as a species.

Many readers and hundreds of millions to billions of people are going to lose everything due to the effects of climate change and ecological collapse. When that happens remember that many voted for it again and again and made excuse after excuse for the people accelerating it, the worst of whom definitely includes Democrats as well as Republicans

As for the US, the sooner it collapses, the better it will be for humanity as a whole. The empire was the global hegemon during the time when everyone knew about climate change, and it not only didn’t stop it, it put the pedal to the metal.

You get what you support. If you like my writing, please SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

I’m fifty-six. I’ll be fifty-seven in less than a month. My hair is white, and my body’s not what it used to be, though in some ways it never was.

My parents were conservatives but I remember back in 1979, they thought Reagan was a bad idea. They were right, but he won, and I was 12 years old, just finished elementary school and about to go to boarding school, as my father had a job in Bangladesh, then the poorest country in the world.

Seventy-nine/eighty is when the world changed. It had been changing before: working class male wages in the US peaked in 68: there was the OPEC crisis, going off gold, stagflation, etc… But it was Thatcher and Reagan who locked in neo-liberalism, which was essentially a looting operation. Sell everything off, burn it all down, turn it into cash and damn the consequences.

And here I am fifty-six watching the end of their crass, stupid and selfish movement. They created the world’s richest rich; transfered the world’s manufacturing base from American allies to China, completely gutted the environment such that we’re now past important tipping points, and they did it with the support of a lot of ordinary folks who wanted to be wealthy without having to work for it thru housing price gains and a stock market that never went down.

Those people: the Reagan Democrats, well, a lot of them won in that they died before the bill came due but the bill is being paid and will be paid by their children, grand-children and great-grand-children.

It was all unnecessary, there were better ways to fix our problems. I’ve written a ton of those articles, so have others, I won’t go into it.

We humans, in the hegemonic power and its satrapies, chose to burn it all down and throw it all away rather than make the necessary changes to create an economy which wouldn’t destroy the planet and which would be good for everyone.

Because of this we’re in classic population over-shoot. Look it up if you don’t know what it is, but basically, animals that overshoot, and we’ve proved ourselves dumb animals, have violent population crashes, and that’s what’s coming.

I write about some topics again and again. I apologize to those who are tired of it. I do so for a couple reasons, the first is that as a mentor once told me “about the time you’re sick of writing it, people are just beginning to get it.”

the second is that I really want you to know. I care about my readers and I want you to get how bad things are going to be: that we’ve passed the peaks and are on the downslide, so that, perhaps, you can do something about it: not to stop it, it isn’t going to be stopped and anyone telling you it will is lying to you, but to prepare and perhaps suffer less.

The sweep of history is fast and slow. It’s slow when you look at a single human life: I’m not going to see the next upswing, I’m too old and not very healthy. It was my curse to be born at the time when an empire decided to destroy itself and the largest environmental disaster in human history was about to happen. I’m lucky, I supposed, compared to those younger than me, most of whom will not see the next upswing either, but won’t have seen some of the good times, even if I didn’t participate in them much.

But the sweep of history is also fast. From Thatcher in 79 to now is forty-five years. That’s not very long. When I read my first economic textbook back in the early 80s, it noted that the US had a trade deficit, but it didn’t matter because American still produced almost everything it needed.

In less than fifty years the greatest industrial power the world had ever seen pissed it away, deliberately. It’s probably not a bad thing, the US was a bad hegemon, though much worse after Reagan than before. The Chinese will start out better and their run will be interrupted by environmental and civilization collapse. The end of American empire is probably bad for me personally, as a Canadian, but I figure it’s a net benefit to the world.

Humanity’s probably going to survive, but the next hundred and fifty years or so are going to be UGLY. Still, if we make it, and I’m betting we will, there will be another side.

I’m not going to stop writing about our problems, but I do want to write my little bit about what a better civilization, during the long emergency and after, might look like, so I’ll try to write more about that.

Thanks to all my readers who have hung on for the ride. I know it hasn’t been the most pleasant: there just hasn’t been much good news to share and that’s not going to change. But that doesn’t mean it’s all gloom, there are some silver linings (like the US going under), and there is some reason to hope for the future and believe that what we do now may influence that future for the better.

Let’s see if we can do that.

You get what you support. If you like my writing, please SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

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 epehemeral 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 to for planned obsolesence! 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.

You get what you support. If you like my writing, please SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE