Ian Welsh

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

Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 15 of 24

The Rules Based International Order is the Minority

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On October 31, 2022

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I’ve said this for a while, but now we have empirical proof that most of the world likes Russia and China more than the US (h/t Johnstone):

“Among the 1.2bn people who inhabit the world’s liberal democracies, three-quarters (75%) now hold a negative view of China, and 87% a negative view of Russia,” the report reads. “However, for the 6.3bn people who live in the rest of the world, the picture is reversed. In these societies, 70% feel positively towards China, and 66% positively towards Russia.”

However, across a vast span of countries stretching from continental Eurasia to the north and west of Africa, we find the opposite – societies that have moved closer to China and Russia over the course of the last decade. As a result, China and Russia are now narrowly ahead of the United States in their popularity among developing countries.

While the war in Ukraine has accentuated this divide, it has been a decade in the making. As a result, the world is torn between two opposing clusters: a maritime alliance of democracies, led by the United States; and a Eurasian bloc of illiberal or autocratic states, centred upon Russia and China.

Now, what they’re saying without quite saying it is that the Ukraine war correlated with even better public opinion towards Russia and China.

I find the next chunk predictable:

However, what matters may not be so much the presence of democratic institutions, but
rather, whether they are valued and appreciated by citizens. If so, attitudes towardscountries such as Russia or the United States might take into account their potential to assist – or damage – the health of their democracy. For a closer look at Figure 20 reveals anumber of electoral democracies, such as Indonesia, India or Nigeria, in which the public remains sympathetic to Russian or Chinese influence, in spite of a difference in political regime. Thus it is not simply whether democratic institutions exist that countsbut rather, the degree to which they are seen as functional and legitimate.

This seems reasonable, at first glance. Here’s the chart:

Eyeball those nations above and below the 50% mark.

What does the grouping below 50% all have in common? What does the grouping above 50% have in common?

Whether or not they could be considered part of the Westerns sphere. Those above the line are generally not those who have done well under US hegemony and who are not Western allies.

So, yeah, this looks to me to be a case of “correlation is not causation”. I would gently suggest that what creates the legitimacy of “democratic institutions” is whether they have delivered for people and that those countries under 50% tend to be those who have been inside the Western (US/EU/close allies bubble.)

So, yes, it is actually about the new cold war.

Now remember, China now does most of the world’s development. It isn’t even close. They build the new ports, airports, hospitals, roads, bridges and even cities. Further, they do it cheaper than the West does it.

So, if you’re a developing nation who isn’t inside the “blessed bubble”, even as bad as that bubble has become under neoliberalism, China looks good and America looks… well, not so good, especially since the US has been the primary driver of trade and finance rules which have been very bad for the third world.

This has been going on for a long time, but since the collapse the USSR there hasn’t been another option. China offers one, and Russia is thumbing its nose at a global order that has gone out of its way to screw over the countries which are above that 50% line.

So, I wouldn’t say it’s exactly about “democratic legitimacy” — that legitimacy is a dependent variable and it is associated with America, NATO and to a lesser extent the EU. When a global regime doesn’t deliver it is discredited, and in fact even in countries under the 50% mark, most have been losing trust in “democratic legitimacy” as well. Americans and British will know well of what I speak.

The end result is that most of the world now slightly favors China and Russia and the important part is that trend is likely to continue. There will be a cold war, and most of the world wants to remain neutral or slightly favors China/Russia. On election Lula in Brazil said they would keep trading with both sides and not be drawn into the cold war, but Brazil is one of the founding members of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) the most important economic bloc that doesn’t include the US. Brazil will remain “neutral” but 31% of Brazil’s exports now go to China and 11% to the US. If the US is stupid enough to push, and military might isn’t determinative, Brazil would be foolish not to go with China.

Power follows industrial capacity and popularity follows treatment. With a few notable exceptions, if you’re a third world country, China treats you better than the US has in ages. As for Russia, well, they may screw with nearby countries, but otherwise they don’t get involved much (remember Syria invited them in, and is a long time ally.) Indians, in particular, remember that Russia was a friend for generations when the US and Europe were not. As for Africa, China has been developing good relations thru trade and development for decades now.

In this cold war, the West is going to be the one isolated, as the above (older) map from the Economist suggests. Yes, they are “neutral” for now, but if forced to choose, don’t assume they’ll choose the current order.

The “rules based international order” is rather small and how it has been run has damaged democratic legitimacy far more than “China” or “Russia”.

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Ukraine Is The First Major War Of The “Age of War and Revolution”

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On October 10, 2022

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There are periods that tend relatively peaceful, and there are eras of war and revolution.

Back in 2016 I added a new category, “The Age of War and Revolution”. It’s now 10 pages long. I added it because it was clear we were transitioning, and we’ve now hit a marker point: the first major war in the Age.

It’s the first, but it won’t be the last.

Sri Lanka was the first collapse of the Age (related “The Twilight of Neoliberalism“, a sub-category).

There will be more of those. My money is currently on England (good chance it won’t be the UK by then) being the first formerly 1st world nation to collapse.

I was talking to a friend about the “get out of the US” advice I’ve been giving for years. People have (rightly) often asked, “but where?” The obvious answer used to be somewhere in Europe, but Europe has chosen decline, and if they don’t manage it well, collapse. Many European countries are going to wind up in 2nd and 3rd world status (many are already 2nd world, and the UK, if you aren’t in the top 10% or so, is already a 3rd world nation, as is America, outside of Europe.)

I’m seeing two interesting trends:

  1. The US is losing its allure to the best and brightest technocrats;
  2. Though anecdotal, for the first time in my life, I know multiple people who want to, are, or have moved to China.

A lot of what made America “special” and led to it being a tech, science and engineering leader for so long is just that so many of the smartest people would emigrate there.

For a long time now I’ve told Americans that Canada is heading in the same direction as the US, we just started in a better place.

But that still matters. If I had gotten cancer in the US, I’d be planning my funeral and considering suicide to avoid the last months of hell. I’d be dead, even if still walking. In 10 years, I’m not sure that wouldn’t be true in Canada, in 20 years, I figure it’s likely.

Some countries will pull together and take care of their populations. Some won’t. Many won’t be able to, no matter how much they want to.

Wars will rage: there will be less resources; food and water will be scarce and per-capita food consumption is going to drop for at least 70 or so years, maybe longer. If you’re young, you’ll see the end of 1st world obesity, though that will be partially driven, at first by countries needing their citizens to be in fighting shape. (Most Americans are too wide to fit thru the hole into an Abrams tank, for example.)

Revolution will be common and so will civil unrest. The idea that non-violence is superior will fade. It will be used some places and times, but the hard ideological commitment to it among the left will die.

I’m unsure how technology will play into it. The obvious play for the rich was always autonomous robots, to overcome the “Who will watch the watchers” problem of police, military and paramilitary forces. But most countries probably won’t have the resources to create and maintain large numbers of armed robots and even the rich ones may find it’s beyond reach outside of certain protected zones.

But for now, just understand, the world has changed. This is a new historical era, we’re now solidly at its start, and Ukraine is only the first of the major wars, not the last.

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Understanding and Surviving the Post-Prosperity Era

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On September 16, 2022

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I don’t usually write about my personal life much, but today will be an exception.

The other day I had to go the hospital, to a cancer clinic (nothing to sweat, I have a type of cancer with a 98% survival rate) and the clinic I was at had only one doctor. It normally has three or four. I asked the nurse, and she told me that the others were out with Covid.

Emergency departments across Canada are having shut-downs because they don’t have enough nurses. Covid, either temporary, or nurses having quit because they can’t take the over-work any more.

Before Covid, at the same hospital I’m going to now, imaging tests for possible cancer got done in a month. After Covid, it was about 8 months, and treatment didn’t start until about 11 months. Before, 2 months.

As I say, I’ll probably live, but if I die of cancer, it will be because of, not Covid, but because of the way Covid was mishandled. For cancer, how fast you act matters. Taking an extra 9 months to start treatment isn’t a small thing: it’s a lot of dead people.

If I die, it’s a marginal (or excess) death. It doesn’t get put down as Covid, and it isn’t, but it is because of how Covid was mishandled.

And, of course, what is the government response to hospitals being slammed “we should get the private sector to do some of this stuff.” Classic neoliberalism: “make service shitty, then privatize.”

But this sort of thing is all across the spectrum. I’ve got friends on the edge, people who would have been OK ten years ago, who are now not OK. The cheap places for rent have mostly gone away; generally speaking rent at the bottom end in Greater Toronto is up about 80 to 100%, if you can find anything at all at the bottom price ranges.

More homeless people. More people paying most of their wage on rent and skimping on food and dental and medicines, because universal health care doesn’t cover dental, and Canadian drug prices are bad, just not completely “American whacked.”

As conditions get worse, people who would have made it, don’t: they get pushed off the edge, because there isn’t as much “safe” space. Homeless, sick, dead, poor.

I’m poor, have been for somewhat less than a decade now, and I’ve been poor in the past, particularly in the early 90s. (In the old days I didn’t ask readers to funds, because I didn’t need to.) I don’t use social support other than some help for cancer meds but when you’re poor, who you know includes other poor people

This period is far worse for people on the margins than the early 90s were, and they were, anecdotally and statistically, worse than the 70s.

So there are more homeless.  More dead people. People who under previous regimes would have made it, stayed housed, stayed healthy, stayed alive, aren’t.

It’s a trend, it’s been a trend for over 40 years now, but it’s an accelerating trend.

The rich are running out of money to take. In America and the UK they’ve shattered the middle and working classes, In Canada and much of the rest of the world they’re working on it. I’d guess Canada has 15 to 20 years before it reaches about where the UK is now, and where the UK is that they’re going to slide to 3rd world status. In principle it can be turned around, but in practice it’s unlikely to be. That’s why I supported Corbyn so hard, because he was the last chance they were going to get.

This trend is accelerated by climate change, and by the insistence on fighting a cold war with China and Russia. Right now the primary target is Russia, yes, but the real target in China. Breaking Russia would weaken China massively, and China is the actual threat to the current hegemonic structure, not Russia, which is not a superpower any more, just a great power (and a fairly weak great power in certain ways.)

The point here is that the way the elites are running the world, and most nations, and Canada where I live is a direct threat to my life at this point, and to many many other people. I have joked that I’m damn glad I got cancer now, because even though treatment is delayed, I’m getting it. In 10 years, I don’t know. I’m seeing stories in the UK of people who have to go private because the NHS is so overwhelmed.

To state what’s obvious private isn’t some miracle. It doesn’t create resources the society doesn’t have, it just distributes them differently: to those who can pay. In fact, generally speaking private uses more resources, because it has to make a profit.

Meanwhile the fact is that the world’s resources are actually shrinking. When climate change dries up rivers and burns up forests and increases bad weather and droughts; when aquifers go dry and glaciers and snow packs(resevoirs of water) diminish and die; when biodiversity crashes and fish stocks go away, the real resources we need to survive are being reduced, close to permanently, since recovery will take a long time even where it is possible.

With people having less resources, they can withstand less shocks, and with resources concentrated at the very top end, many people can’t take hits. More and more people are one hit away from homelessnes or death, and to top it all off Long Covid disablement is soaring and will soon be in the double digits in many Western nations.

This is, then, the culling. It’s been going on for a long time, but it’s speeding up. I wrote for a couple decades to warn other people, and now I can see my personal horizon: I can see when I’ll be on the edge. I’m already on the edge, really, as my emergency fundraiser (a first) and the delays in my cancer treatment show. I used to be able to keep other people out of poverty with help, now the aid I can give is restricted. I’m no longer much of a material resource for other (though I help with showers and food and sleep).

But this isn’t mostly about me, it’s about a lot of people being pushed towards the cliff. It’s about you and people you know. Even a lot of people in the middle class have no resiliency left: one bad bounce and off the cliff they go.

The next stage is the elites turning on each other. Having stolen all the fat and most of the muscle of the lower and middle class, they’re going to see no choice but start chewing on societies organs and to start seriously preying on each other, because there’s hardly any reserve left. In the UK, the NHS is the only major thing left worth selling. Once that’s gone, there’s nothing left to loot. All the stuff worth having will be held by other rich people.

Now, there are a few points here, and readers will have picked out some of them, but let’s state a couple clearly.

First, a lot of people, a hell of a lot of people, aren’t going to make it. If you want to not be one of them; if you want your friends and other people you care about not to be one of them, you’re going to need to do something. Probably the best thing is to organize in groups. Do what you can to help yourselves, and make it clear to the rich and powerful that  your problems are theirs: that if you get pushed off the cliff, you’re going to make it hurt them.

The second is that on the mass scale, it’s now us or our elites. They go, or we go, and they want it to be us.

Plan for this era. Climate change is now and it’s just going to get worse and our elites are going to become greater and greater predators, trying to liquidate everything they can find to keep themselves in power.

Remember that personal resilence has its limits: you need other people who care about you and have the ability to help. You need more than family, you need a community, a group and that group needs to take care of its prosperity and have a commitment to caring for its own people.

We did that thru government for a long time, but government isn’t going to hack it for a lot of people. When times like that happen, you form your own mini-governments to do what larger society won’t.

It’s sad, it’s bad, and it’s what millions of people, including myself, spent our lives fighting to avoid, but it’s here and that’s just how it is. Even if some societies turn it around and start doing the right thing, it’s unsure which ones those will be and by the time they get to it, if you aren’t caring for yourself and your chosen group, you may be dead or on the street.

And understand that everyone’s doing the wrong thing. No major society is taking this seriously. When they stop building suburbs and stop pushing cars and stop allowing planned obsolescence, you’ll know they’re serious. No government which has not done at least those three thing is serious, and since our entire economy is built around cars, real-estate expansion and throwing shit out which was designed to last only a few years, we haven’t even started.

Be well, take care of yourselves, and if you can, please organize and take care of others.

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The Trifecta+ Which Will Make The Next 100 Years Hell

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On August 19, 2022

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The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

We have three major challenges all coming to peak close to each other.

Or possibly four, depending on how you define your terms.

First: the end of a sub-ideological era. Neoliberalism is on its last legs, just as New Deal liberalism was in the 70s. Ends of sub-ideologies tend to be tumultuous and it’s worse when it’s the end of a fundamentally extractive sub-ideology like neoliberalism, than it is with the end of a “building” ideology like the New Deal which worked to strengthen people, regulate companies and build vast human and inanimate infrastructure.

Neoliberalism was, fundamentally, the realization that all that build-up led to a huge looting opportunity. Get rid of the regulations, stop enforcing anti-oligopoly laws, force massive asset bubbles and those on the inside could get stinking rich.

The New Deal was a reaction to the problems created by a certain type of exploitative capitalism: a “we can’t allow this sort of abuse”, where neoliberalism was “man, abusing people, and destroying/privatizing institutions makes a lot of money.”

So, the 70s sucked, but they were nothing near as bad as the great depression and WWII.

But that’s also because the transition to neoliberalsim did not coincide with—

Second: the end of a hegemonic era. 1914 to 1945 is the end of not just British but European world hegemony. At the end WWII the USSR and US divide Europe in half, with the US controlling the Western half and the USSR the eastern. That the America glove was often velvet, did not change the fact that there was a steel gauntlet underneath (look up Gladio, as an example.)

The death tolls of WWI (21m), II(50m) and the Great Depression (uncounted), plus the anti-colonial wars, famines and the Japanese conquests(14m) and colonial wars is in excess of a 100 million. At the end of WWII, the world population was about 1.33 billion people. That’s a lot dead people and we aren’t counting all the people who were maimed, impoverished, made into refugees, raped or tortured. Nor are we counting the USSR pogroms (we probably should) or the colonial famines (we probably should.)

Hegemonic powers do not go easy into the sunset, and the more powerful they were, the harder they die.

But although there were some serious environmental problems in this era (the dust bowl, for example), the simultaneous end of the hegemonic and sub-ideological cycles which occurred in the early 20th century (which includes communism), didn’t have what we have coming—

Third: a worldwide environmental crisis which will reduce the Earth’s carrying capacity semi-permanently. At best reversal will take hundreds of years and be partial, because we aren’t going to be able to un-extinct all the species we’re killing and the depth and vibrancy of the ecological web is a huge part of Earth’s biological carrying capacity.

So, we can reasonably expect that a significantly greater proportion of the Earth’s human population will die during the upcoming period and more people will be impoverished, tortured, raped, turned into refugees and so on. It is not impossible to imagine a scenario where that didn’t happen, but it requires human social groups to act with decisiveness, wisdom, compassion and forethought which have no precedent in human history I am aware of.

These is what I’ve partially labelled in my categories as “The Age of War and Revolution” and “The Twilight of Neoliberalism”, but they are much larger than that.

Now there is also a larger cycle coming. You’ll note that I kept calling New Deal Capitalism and Neoliberalism sub-ideologies. They’re both capitalist ideologies, and the capitalist world-system has been around since the late 15th century, blossoming with the industrial revolution into a global world-system. Previous to this, contradicting the name, most world-systems didn’t cover the entire globe, but capitalism did. Even communism was part of the system (that’s an entire other article, but the USSR was not in autarchy and was forced to play the game by capitalist world rules.)

Capitalism is ending. There are a bunch of reasons (follow the prior link), but one big part of it is simply that it’s going to have been seen to have failed and be blamed by everyone for the environmental crisis (it’s not just a climate crisis, ecological collapse is at least as important). Democracy stands a chance of getting it in the neck too.

We aren’t just going to be changing sub-ideologies and swapping hegemonic powers and dealing with an enviro-collapse; we are going to be changing how we fundamentally run our societies, because it is almost certain that you can’t be capitalist and fix the environment, and in any case, again, capitalism will totally be discredited by all the deaths and catastrophes during this era.

Likewise, we are going to have to transition from the hydrocarbon era which has run since near the start of the industrial revolution because we cannot fix our environmental issues and have hydrocarbons be our primary energy source.

So, depending on whether you count the transition from capitalism to whatever, we’ve got the end of 5 eras or so. (WWI to II also saw a sub-transition in energy, from coal and steam engines to oil and internal combustion.)

This is compounded by the fact that end of sub-ideological and ideological eras always occurs with fanatically incompetent elites in charge. The classic western example is the fall of Rome, but look at the Weimar Republic, at Hoover, at Nixon/Ford/Carter and so on. The generations who created the previous system are dead or out of power and their heirs are boobs who don’t know how to repair their system. When the Lost generation, the last generation to remember the 20s, not just the great depression) died, a subset of the GI and Silent generations then destroyed the New Deal, both negatively (unable to deal with the oil shocks) and positively (Reagan/Thatcher/Friedman, etc..)

The people in charge now are radically incompetent at everything except internal power games. They are good at accumulating money and staying in charge and bad at everything else. They cannot fix any problems, at best they mitigate, and their mitigations (such as central banks printing money in response to the 2008 financial crisis) make underlying problems worse. On top of simple mechanical incompetence, they are also unimaginative: they cannot conceive of different ways of running society. Even when there are partial exceptions (Chinese leadership handling Covid semi-competently is an example) the elites can’t see their way to ending the ideology (capitalism, and yes, China is a capitalist mixed society) which is destroying the conditions for its own existence.

So this is where we are: the end of an ideological era; the end of a hegemonic era and a huge environmental crisis, all of which can’t be handled without fundamental ideological and leadership changes and which an reasonably be expected to kill billions of people while we “figure” or “fumble” it out.

Welcome to the fin de siecle. More than one. Enjoy the fruits of decadence while they still last.

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Are Our Elites Starting to Get It?

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On August 1, 2022

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Back in May, in Sri Lanka:

Recently, they also burned down the President’s home.

Meanwhile, the Canadian government:

The tax will apply to new cars and aircraft with a retail sales price over $100,000 and to vessels over $250,000. It will be calculated at the lesser of 20 percent of the value above a set threshold ($100,000 for cars and personal aircraft, and $250,000 for vessels) and ten percent of the full value of the item subjected to tax.

And the US Senate’s Climate bill, which Manchin approved:

The bill includes $60 billion to boost domestic clean energy manufacturing, including $30 billion in production tax credits for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and critical mineral processing. It also offers lower- and middle-income motorists a $7,500 tax credit for clean vehicles, while states and electric utilities would see $30 billion in grants and loans to expand clean energy. The bill also includes $60 billion for environmental justice communities and a fee on methane emissions that will rise to $1,500 a ton by 2026.

All of these are what I would class as “good news,” though insufficient. Adam Smith once quipped that “there is a lot of ruin in a nation,” but a country like Sri Lanka has less ruin than many others. England’s decline could be considered to have begun in 1914, and it’s only this decade that they’re likely to lose Scotland — and it’ll be a while yet before Brits start burning down toff mansions wholesale.

The problem with Sri Lanka is that almost all of the debt which is crippling it is to Western institutions, not to China (which is at about ten percent), but China is the country which will wind up bailing it out after the initial IMF stopgap, because China needs a stable country to have a naval base in. If India was smart, they’d step in instead, to deny the Chinese the base. As for the West, they don’t care and just want their money. China is likely delaying in part because they’d rather not send a ton of money to the West by paying for Sri Lanka’s debt.

Elites finally seem to be starting to understanding that climate change is serious, and that the rich are out of control. I think that the rich will come to regret the Russian oligarch sanctions hunt, because it taught everyone how easy it actually is to take everything from rich people, a lesson of the post-war era which has been forgotten because most who remember it are old or dead.

This is all very slim “good news.” With respect to climate change, I am of the opinion that we will not hold it at two degrees C, though some climate scientists disagree. I have found that the more “pessimistic” forecasts have consistently been more reliable, and I believe that self-reinforcing cycles, such as methane release from permafrost and swamps, and the destruction of most of the world’s remaining great forests, have been triggered. We can and should mitigate climate change by reducing emissions, but we have left it too late to contain catastrophic climate change. (I also expect a couple of marine inundations this century (colloquially, great floods) — and earlier than most people think likely.)

As for the rich, they’re still in control, but that control is unlikely to remain as firm as they expect. They were warned of this many times; that they couldn’t allow rampant inequality, poverty, catastrophe, and gouge on necessities like water, food, fuel, and life-saving medicines and expect to escape unscathed.

They key variable to watch is food, or rather, hunger. When people can’t eat (or drink), social controls break down. The Chinese understand that; every dynasty has known that if they didn’t feed the people, they were in great danger, and the Communist dynasty (that’s what it is, and it’s still essentially “rule by bureaucrats”) understands it as well. The Indian government, on the other hand, obsessed with fucking over non-Hindus and cleansing the country, seems to have forgotten.

The West, as a whole, has a great deal of agricultural surplus, and it will take some time for hunger to really hit, unless neoliberal ideology blinds politicians to the danger of continuing to allow rampant food inflation. If people can’t afford to eat, it’s the same as there not being enough food for them, and hunger leads to people with little to lose.

Interesting times, etc. Might as well enjoy the show as best we can, because we’re going to suffer through it as well.

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The European Position at the End of the Unipolar World

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On July 21, 2022

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It’s hard to remember now, but in the early 2000s, the EU appeared to be the onrushing power. It was gaining new members, who clamored to join, both its economy and the Euro were strong, and it had avoided entanglement in Iraq. Its prestige was high (having nations begging you to let them in their club tends to do that).

What I suggested the Europeans do, at the time, was try and make the Euro into an alternate reserve currency. They also should have increased their military, making them non-reliant on the US in the guise of NATO. Within the EU, steps needed to be taken to stop the abuse of the Euro by Germany as a subsidy for its manufacturing (because the Euro was lower than a pure-German currency would have been) and to allow genuine subsidies in other countries to make up for the disadvantages they would incur as a result of using a Euro — which was priced too high. Aggressive moves towards energy independence would also be necessary, as Europe was –and is — obviously resource deficient.

None of this was done. It appears that EU leaders were comfortable being US subjects, or at least, they didn’t want to challenge it. Germany’s policy towards Russia was trade, sold on the assumption that trade alone would make them good little Europeans, without offering them a path into either NATO or the EU, and with the added insult of allowing and participating in the looting of Russia during the 90s.

As for economic policies like subsidies and some counterweight to German exports, well, that would contravene the neoliberal, technocratic ideology that very much rules Eurocrat elites: the rules are the rules and if your economy gets trashed by them, as Finland and Italy, among others, found out.

In 2008, the Europeans followed the Fed (and, admittedly, everyone else) into a gigantic bank bailout, then spent most of their time since printing money for rich people (a reasonable description of central bank special operations during that era).

Meanwhile, anti-Russia sanctions proliferated, Russia-EU/US relations deteriorated (especially due to to the fight for influence over Ukraine — but that was definitely not the reason), and it all flared into crisis when Russia invaded Ukraine after years of Ukrainian military operations in the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics.

That led to sanctions, which have so far hurt Europe worse than Russia, as the European (and especially German) power grid needs Russia natural gas and coal which they can’t easily obtain elsewhere. Damage to industry has also occurred, and some observers expect it to cost entire German industries and millions of jobs; nor is the rest of Europe unaffected.

The problem now is that a fast move away from natural gas, oil, and coal isn’t possible. Heat exchangers work, but there aren’t enough available. Renewables are great, but transitioning takes time and anti-Xinjiang sanctions mean that 50 percent of the world’s silica supply, along with much of its solar panels, are no longer available.

Meanwhile there’s a heat wave, Europeans don’t have air-conditioning, and live in buildings largely designed for cold weather (with some southern exceptions), and, as everyone loves to say, “Winter is coming.”

Transition is not impossible, but it will take time. It is going to require restarting any nuclear plants which can still work (the numbers do not work without it) and probably building some new nuclear reactors, along with a buildout of various forms of renewable energy. Even moving to imported, and more expensive, US natural gas is not as easy as it seems: it requires infrastructure which does not exist.

Russia, meanwhile, as we’ve discussed before, is restricting natural gas supplies and threatening cutoffs. They can’t buy European goods, and they need the money less than Europe needs gas, coal, and minerals. They are diversifying to the East and South as fast as they can. Add to that to their position as one of the world’s largest grain producers is serendipitous at a time grain production comes under pressure from climate change, and consider that they are capturing a fair bit of Ukraine’s farmland, some of the most productive in the world.

Then there is China. Europe does a lot of business with China and there are massive trade ties. But Europe continues its anti-China rhetoric and keeps putting on additional sanctions against China. China wants the European market, and there are still some advanced items they need to buy from Europe, but political considerations, especially with regards to Taiwan and Xinjiang, may trump such considerations. In particular, it is not in China’s interest for Russia to be defeated or broken up as so many in Europe want, as Russia is a key supplier without which China cannot resist a US naval blockade.

Europe finds itself in a position where it’s scared of Russia and outraged. Eastern Europeans in particular want a complete hardline because they genuinely fear conquest or Finlandization. Without reliable access to Russian resource, Europe is forced to rely on the US and various unpleasant Middle Eastern states and to pay higher prices.

And meanwhile, the simple fact is that transitioning to energy and resources without Russia is hard and will take years. I’d think a full transition, even if done competently, will take a decade or so. Combined with the need for the US in order to stand up to Russia (EU militaries are a joke, Ukraine actually had the largest one), and the Europeans find themselves completely back in US satrapy mode. The US is sending more troops and building bases and that’s how it has to be, if hostility to Russia remains.

Which means that the EU has another task: it has to build its own military, capable of standing up to Russia. This is by no means impossible: Europe is technologically advanced and still has the necessary industry, including world leading aviation, but right now all that is happening is buying more US made weapons and hosting more US troops.

If Europe wants to be anything but a satrapy, it has to fix it energy and resource issues; it has to build a military and it needs to do something even harder—it needs to rethink its ideology, and allow proper industrial policy internally. This is hard to do when it’s dependent on outside resources from a hegemonic power, but if it refuses to do so, it will remain an American satrapy.

How much of this will be done is unclear. Exchanging reliance on Russia for the US may seem like an improvement, but it is still dependence and if Chinese relations sour, the Europeans become “locked in”, with few options.

It’s hard to imagine the current generation of European leadership managing this well, but perhaps they will surprise or, more hopefully, perhaps they will be replaced by more competent politicians.

But overall, it looks like Europe is slowly marching towards its historical norm, less and less important and powerful on the global stage.

A lot, of course, will depend on climate change and who gets hit the worst and handle it the best, but right now Europe looks to be in decline, with an opportunity, if they take it, to use this crisis to come out stronger and less dependent on outsiders.

I hope they take the opportunity.

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Russia Turns Up the Pressure (and Turns Off the Gas) on Germany and the EU

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On July 18, 2022

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Well, well…

Russia’s Gazprom has told customers in Europe it cannot guarantee gas supplies because of “extraordinary” circumstances, according to a letter seen by Reuters, upping the ante in an economic tit-for-tat with the west over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Dated 14 July, the letter from the Russian state gas monopoly said it was declaring force majeure on supplies, starting from 14 June.

Known as an “act of God” clause, a force majeure clause is standard in business contracts and spells out extreme circumstances that excuse a party from their legal obligations.

So, Europe and Germany get gas in exchange for rubles. But Russia can’t spend those rubles for most of what it needs from the West.

The question is, does Europe, especially Germany, need gas more than Russia needs rubles and an increased exchange rate (not always a good thing)?

Everyone has been concentrating on the winter and assuming Germany didn’t need much gas until then, but a great deal of Germany’s electrical grid is supplied by natural gas plants, and as you may have heard, there’s a heat wave in Europe and most of the rest of the world.

So much for air-conditioning. And if much of Germany’s industry will have to shut down as well.

Germany can lose a huge chunk of its industrial base if this continues. The whole “keep buying gas from Russia until we can transition off of it” idea was always dubious, because other gas is much more expensive, but it also rested on the idea that Russia was desperate to keep selling; that there was a symmetry of needs.

But Russia will suffer a lot less without sales than Europe will without gas, and in any case, a shutoff will likely increase the price of gas they are selling elsewhere, making up some of the losses.

The fact is that Germany, an industrial state without a lot of resources, and Russia, a resource state, are natural economic allies, but Germany needs Russia more than Russia needs Germany.

The companies who have been given notice that of force majeure are saying they don’t accept it, but what are they going to do?

The grace period for payments on two of Gazprom’s international bonds expires on 19 July, and if foreign creditors are not paid by then the company will technically be in default.

This is a non-threat threat, because Russia has already defaulted on loans, as it is largely shut out from the Western banking system and thus can’t even transfer the money. (As happened to Argentina.) More defaults theoretically mean that Russia will be unable to access Western loans and so on, but they already can’t, and they have access to the Chinese banking system, which is larger than any Western country’s and perfectly capable of keeping Russia and Russian companies afloat.

Understand clearly that most Germans and Europeans support the anti-Russia sanctions. This is a popularly backed policy: Europeans are paralyzed by fear of Russia and were long before Ukraine. I had a friend in Austria tell me how he scared he was of Putin back in 2016.

We will, however, see what the result of this is. I would guess that in the short-term, it will stiffen opposition to Russia, but I’m less sure about the medium- and long-term. German elites, especially, will feel a need to end the Ukraine war and get back to a steady Russian supply.

No matter what, however, it highlights the price Europe is paying for its anti-Russia stance.

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Now That We’re At Peak, How Fast Will Civilization Collapse Be?

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On July 5, 2022

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Last week I wrote an article about the future of civilization, collapse centered around a graph from “Limits To Growth.”

I spent a fair bit of time staring at this graph yesterday, and I want to return to it, because it says some very important things about what’s coming up over the next decades.

The first thing to understand is that the future is, as William Gibson has noted, unevenly distributed. Sri Lanka is currently all-out collapse, for example.

The chart above is GLOBAL. Regional charts will be similar, but not identical and the time axis will differ. Some regions will collapse slower, peak later and so on.

The first thing I want you do is find the population line. Notice that it peaks in 2050.

Now, find the services per capita line. Peaks about 2020.

Now, the industrial output per capita. Also peaks about 2020.

And now look at the food per capita line, same thing.

But it’s not the peak that matters, go back and look at what happens after the peak.

Now, go back to those three lines and see what they do after 2020.

Not quite vertical declines, but very very steep.

Look at the food per capita line now. Go to the very right of the chart, then to the very left.

Somewhat under half the food per capita in 1900 will be produced in 2100. Move back a little and you’ll see it actually bottoms around 2060, then slowly recovers.

All three of the production lines have precipitous declines. The industrial production line manages best, winding up around a 1950 number, but remember that most of the world was not industrialized back then, just Europe, Japan, and North America. This is a world number. Next, consider the primary industrial nation today is China: don’t assume that it’s Europe and North America who will necessarily be the one with the big chunk of the remains: it isn’t going to be just a reversion to 1950 (especially considering the food collapse.)

Services come off the worst: services are, in most cases, luxuries. If we want to keep the important services like health care and education we’re going to have to prioritize them and be ruthless about cutting service crap we don’t actually need.

As for the good stuff, pollution peaks around 2035 in this model. Sounds promising and it is, but the problem is that we will be past self-reinforcing cycles at that point: methane release from permafrost for example, so climate change will continue. And as people become desperate for food, and they will, every wild animal, including the fish, and anything else edible will be plundered, so ecological collapse will continue and even accelerate.

Population doesn’t peak till 2050 in this model. Look down to the food line and you’ll see that food per capita recovers when population declines. In part this indicates a semi-permanent change in the Earth’s carrying capacity: some will recover, over time, but for a long time it just won’t be able to produce as much food for us.

Now, flip over to the death line. It goes vertical in the 2040s. Of course, the Club of Rome couldn’t model Covid, so I suspect we may get there earlier and the plague may help a number of these lines be somewhat better, ironically.

But do notice that when the death line goes vertical, it’s damn near at 90 degrees. A LOT of people are going die.

The population, death and birth lines indicate that deaths are driving the population decrease. I’m hoping that the births line is wrong, it goes vertical not long after the deaths line and that’s why the food per capita numbers remain abysmal. If we want to have even semi-decent conditions for most people we’re going to need decreasing population for quite some time. I’ve seen estimates that the world carrying capacity may crash as much as 80%. Hopefully it won’t be that bad, but if most of the tropics are uninhabitable we’re in a world of hurt and every estimate I’ve seen is that climate change takes away far more agricultural land than it creates farther north.

All of that before we get to the permanent damage done to our supplies of fresh water, which is a definite limiting factor. Even if we make desalinization work, well, there’s a lot of land that’s nowhere near the sea.

This is a chart you should spend time with, till it soaks into your emotional bones. Look at the shape of those curves.

This is civilization collapse. It is going to be very bad, much worse than most people expect.

The collapse has begun, worldwide. It’s not evenly distributed, but it’s here.

We are post peak. Plan accordingly.

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