Ian Welsh

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

Category: Environment Page 3 of 14

Climate change is getting worse, faster. It’s accelerating. What is required to change that?

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On October 26, 2022

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Who would have expected? All three are accelerating, with Methane the worst.

Now my first reaction was that this was a reaction to Covid restrictions ending, but if you look at the chart it’s clear that isn’t the case, as the amount of increase is more than Pre-Covid.

Related:

This is why I laughed when people heralded Kyoto or Paris or any other climate agreements. The treaties have no teeth and are generally dead on arrival. And it’s small countries that tend to do the most, which isn’t what is needed.

To put it simply, there is no way we’re going to stop at a 2 degrees change, and those who say otherwise are guilty, at best, of wishful thinking. Yes, it’s “theoretically” possible, but there is a real world and in the real world it will not happen absent revolution, peaceful or otherwise, because it requires actions our rulers will not take. (Look at Germany, in energy crisis, still refusing to turn nuclear reactors back on.)

Nor will anything other than radical change work. In the beginning of the pandemic, when most of the major industrial countries were in lockdown, concentrations kept going up. The very structure of our society requires these emissions and thus we will have to change the structure, simply doing “less” the same way won’t do the job, though it may happen, albeit not voluntarily.

We must move to a full electrical economy. We are going to have to design and build better, safer nuclear reactors and we are going to have become the sort of societies which can run nuclear safely. To fix the ecosystem collapse (related but not identical) we’re going to have to change how we do agriculture almost entirely, remove almost all toxins from our products and go to a combination of very high density cities (no more sprawl) and people who live outside of those high density areas will have to be ecological stewards: their existence must make ecodiversity increase, not decrease or they simply can’t be allowed.

We will also have to outlaw planned obsolesence and make it a criminal offense for anyone, including officers of corporations and perhaps even shareholders to create a product which does not have the smallest possible footprint or which is not designed to be easily repaired and upgraded. No more non-biodegradable products which are not designed for long lives. As much as possible will have to be made bio-degradable and again, not doing so will be a crime, with criminal sentences in prison.

None of this is impossible, and oddly, it will create a world which is in certain ways, much more pleasant to live in and which gives people much more agency.

But it won’t happen under the current system or with the current elites. Capitalism as we know it has to go, and every ruling elite in every major country must be replaced.

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Destruction of the Humanities & Social Sciences and Societal Mis-allocation of Resources

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On August 29, 2022

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Since 2008 we’ve seen the rise of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and the decline of the humanities and social sciences. Students want to study engineering, programming, science and so on because that’s where the good jobs are, student debt levels are obscene and there has been a social movement towards the glorification of the sciences.

All the good, right? Science and engineering have given us TVs, running water, power and miniature pocket computers which can make phone calls and spy on us 24/7.

But the world has some problems: climate change and ecological collapse and war and plague and so on.

The solution to these problems includes technology and science, to be sure. But generally speaking we aren’t even using the tech we have to solve our problems. Air filtration in every classroom and public building would cut Covid massively, and it’s cheap, and we aren’t doing it. We have known about climate change for ages, and done essentially nothing, even though we have the ability to. Instead, we doubled-down on fracking and finding more oil and gas and we built massive numbers of private jets, whose emission add significantly to the problem.

We’re not using the tech we have to solve our problems, and in many cases we’re using it to make the problem worse.

In other words, are problems aren’t primarily technological: in fact it is our disuse and misuse of technology which is causing many of our worst problems. It’s a sorceror’s apprentice situation, we have power without the wisdom and control necessary to use it safely.

Our problems are social. That means that if academia can help, the help will have to come from the social sciences (not including economics) and from the humanities, which are the disciplines which deal with humanity in all our glorious disastrousness.

Massively emphasizing STEM, except perhaps biological and environmental related sciences, is putting the pedal to the metal until we can sort our social issues which make us use our technology in ways that are vastly self-destructive.

If we want to stop the onrushing disasters, currently epitomized by rivers drying up in Europe and China, that means fixing why we’re doing the wrong things, not the right ones. Technology and science are tools, they tell us how to do things; they can provide some guidance on what to do, but they don’t determine what we do. As climate scientists are well aware, guidance doesn’t work in society isn’t willing to follow it.

Increasing STEM while doing the wrong things with it isn’t a solution, it’s a problem. Perhaps the humanities and social sciences aren’t the solution, but they at least attempt to deal with it, with the fact that we keep doing the wrong things even when we know the right things and know how to do them.

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The Chinese and European Droughts & What They Mean For the Future

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On August 25, 2022

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No doubt you’ve seen pictures like the one below from both China and Europe:

Famously, in European rivers “hunger stones” set in the past to indicate when water was so low it indicated an incoming famine, have been uncovered.

Chinese officials are scrambling to find enough water for irrigation. Meanwhile the wheat crop in India was devastated by a heat wave at planting time.

Will there be famine in Europe or China? I doubt it. What will happen instead is famine in the global “south”, because European countries and China can afford to buy grain. Since grain started flowing out of Ukraine, to the best of my knowledge not one shipment went to the “south”.

This doesn’t mean there won’t be suffering in China and especially parts of Europe. Though prices have dropped recently, I expect prices will again rise, and combined with rising fuel prices, winter will be harsh for many (those without a lot of money, obviously. The rich will be fine and still dine on caviar in warm rooms beneath brilliantly lit chandeliers.) I imagine that if Nord Stream 1 isn’t shut off by then, it will have further maintenance issues in the winter.

But what’s interesting about these droughts is that:

1) they weren’t predicted to happen so soon;

2) the knock on effects like the devastation of hydropower in China. Which, ironically, means they will be scrambling to burn more hydrocarbons, especially coal.

What is underestimated when people talk about climate change and environmental collapse is that it makes events far more unpredictable. Once in a thousand year events, under the previous extremely stable climate system start happening often. Weather doesn’t act according to previous patterns, and since there is more energy (heat) available, it is stronger. There’ll be more rain, for example, but you may not like that much. Hurricane top strength is higher than in the past. Droughts happen which wouldn’t have before. The Sahel monsoon has become unpredictable over the last 50 years, caused by climate change, and that has been a large part of many famines.

We expected the weather to act in certain ways, and while there were definitely surprises, mostly it has, for thousands of years. This doesn’t discount Europe’s warm period or little ice age, but overall, weather has been pretty consistent.

Now it isn’t. And it will be more inconsistent for a hundred or two hundred years. When you’re moving from one equilibrium to another, there tend to be wild swings until the new equilibrium settles in. Since we really have no idea what the new equilibrium will look like or when we’ll get there (saying X degrees says little and those predictions are dubious) we don’t know how long this will go on, or how bad it’ll be. A hundred to two hundred years is really just a guess.

What this means for societies is that they need to create systems which don’t expect weather or environment as usual. What it means for individuals and groups is the same. You can’t count on the normal weather. You can’t be sure the environment won’t collapse where you are, or somewhere you import food or other resources from. So you need to be able to handle what amount to near random events.

As I mentioned before, this means that outdoor gardens aren’t the hedge a lot of people think they are. Look into greenhouses and other climate controlled options. Find an independent water source, or store large amounts of water. Etc, etc… If you can’t do that (and Lord knows I can’t do most of it) do what you can, and prepare yourself psychologically.

Because our infrastructure was created for a certain climate and environment, it’s going to fail. During the heat wave some railways in England became unusable as the rail tracks expanded in the heat. It’s possible to build railways made for heat, many countries have, but then they aren’t suitable for real cold. So English railways shut down. Roads in Southern China have literally melted in the sun (this is one reason asphalt sucks and always has.) And yes, those hydropower plants.

We’re in for a very rough period in human history. All the power people were thinking it wouldn’t really start for another 20 to 30 years. They were wrong (as I predicted repeatedly over the years.) It’s here now. There will likely be pull-backs to the previous baseline, not good years, but better ones, but the overall trend will not change.

As for the global economic system, it is in slow-motion collapse. That will not change, and it will also occur in ways that are unpredictable in the short to medium term.

Be prepared, if you can.

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Most Zero Sum Games Are Negative Sum & So Are Most Positive-Sum Games

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On August 24, 2022

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In economics there’s the idea of how much a “game” nets, where a game is any economic activity. The ideal is to have positive sum games, where more good comes from the game than bad, and ideally all players of the game win. A classic zero-sum game is if you and I bet $10 on a coin flip: any win is precisely mirrored by loss. And a negative sum game is where people come out worse: a lot of wars are like this, no matter how much plunder, both sides are worse off at the end.

Just because a game is negative sum doesn’t mean it can’t be positive sum for a few people. War, again, is often like this. Masses of people may be killed, huge amounts of wealth destroyed and certain war profiteers may come out much richer and some politicians or generals much more powerful. Some soldiers may loot enough that war was better for them than peace.

The fundamental environmental critique of capitalism and industrialization is that it only looks like a positive sum game: that the damage we are doing to the environment (which includes climate change, but not just that) and to our health, makes it a negative sum game if one uses the proper time horizon (aka. if you won’t die before the bill becomes due) or if you include everyone (aka. being conquered by Britain was not good for Indians; being conquered mostly Europeans was not good for native North Americans, almost all of whom died) and capitalism has not been a marvel for most of the third world. Which is why, by the way, there are all those “best time to be alive ever” books which try to use dubious extreme poverty statistics to claim this is the closest we’ve ever gotten to utopia: they want to argue that capitalism and industrialization are positive sum games, at least for now.

These folks have no real argument against climate change and environmental collapse and tend to hand wave it with “technology will fix it” as if technology can un-extinct half the world’s species.

So in the big picture we’ve been playing a negative sum game for a long time. The destruction of the native civilizations of North America was a negative sum game. The impoverishment of India under the British East India company was a negative sum game (India started out with more industry than England, by a fairly wide margin.) Africa’s exploitation, from the slave trade to colonization was a negative sum game, which is not to deny they didn’t get some railroads and whatnot out of it. (The Belgians were the worst, but the French who are still making African nations pay them for having been conquered are mighty bad. England’s evils are well known.)

But we’re in a lot of local negative sum games. Wall Street types like to brag they “eat what they kill” and it’s accurate in all sorts of way. The entire run-up to 2008 was negative-sum: that’s why it took trillions to bail them out. All their profits came from creating much larger losses than their profits, then having other people pay them off and suffer a long light depression. And Central banks didn’t then go on to print trillions more because value was being produced after 2008, they had to print to keep covering the fact that real economic value was being destroyed.

Your average Wall Street executive is a sort of super-optimized human locust, getting fat by destroying real value. Private Equity as a whole is so clearly massively negative sum that if you try to deny it you live so far in a fantasy world there’s no point in talking. The entire neoliberal movement, with its poster-child policy of austerity was and is about damaging the real economy to make a small number of people richer.

A lot like those war profiteers we discussed earlier: they cause widespread misery, illness and death but they get very rich doing so.

(The military industrial complex is obviously negative sum, which, again, doesn’t mean it doesn’t benefit some people.)

The job of governments is to create positive sum games and to stop negative sum games. In some ways that’s almost their only legitimate function. (Any crime system with high recidivism, or large numbers incarcerated is negative sum, by the way, but boy, a lot of people get rich locking other people up.)

A society with a lot of negative sum games running can be compared to an animal with a lot of ticks attached, a tapeworm, and some nasty diseases. It’s supporting a lot of parasites, but one day it falls over dead after a great deal of suffering, and then the parasite have to try to find a new host. If they can’t, because they’ve infected the entire herd (or destroyed the grazing land), well, then they too die.

Welcome to the fin de siecle of capitalist society.

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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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Collapse Of Water Supply For Countries Around Tibet

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On August 16, 2022

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Amu-Darya Watershed

Tibet is a water tower; its glaciers, snow packs and lakes are the source of many of the greatest rivers in the countries around it. Two of those are the Indus river in India and Pakisatan, and the Amu-Darya which flows along the border of Afghanistan.

A recent study predicts:

large declines under a mid-range carbon emissions scenario by the mid-twenty-first century. Excess water-loss projections for the Amu Darya and Indus basins present a critical water resource threat, indicating declines of 119% and 79% in water-supply capacity, respectively.

Wait? Over 100%?

Anyway, this sort of thing is why I’m so negative on prospects for India and the areas which rely on the Tibetan glaciers and snow pack for water, which includes much of China, Thailand and Vietnam (the Mekong) as well. Note that this same process is occurring elsewhere: in the European alps, in the Rockies in North America, and in the rivers fed by the great northern glaciers of Canada.

What happens here will lead to denialist stupidity: the increased heat will, in some areas, lead to some years where there are is MORE water, and floods and so on, until the glaciers, in particular, collapse. So we are likely to alternate drought with floods, until the rivers just dry up, and many of the lakes with them.

When the Tibetan water tower collapses, the countries around it will be devastated. The West of North America will suffer a similar fate, though those on the coast may be able to replace much of the water with desalinization (it’s expensive, but the numbers I’ve seen indicate it’s doable, especially if you decide to stop growing almonds and other water expensive crops), but those on the wrong side of the Rockies, or high up, are pretty much out of luck. The East is in somewhat better shape, but the Great Lakes, which are close to stasis anyway, will be put under great pressure and if we try to use very much water from them we will easily drain them.

On the other side of the equation, rain patterns will shift. Hotter air means more rain, generally speaking, but where it goes is likely to change. It’s reasonable to suppose that the Sahara might get monsoons again, for example, but we just don’t know the full effects. If the monsoon fails in any region, that region will be devastated.

Add to this the massive drainage and poisoning of aquifers, including in North America, India and China and we have a situation where it is entirely reasonable to expect an absolute collapse of food production. I suspect, as I’ve discussed in other articles, that as per the “Limits to Growth” modeling, we’re about at the per capita food production peak, though not yet the absolute peak.

This stuff appears to be me to be baked in. It would require much more radical restriction of CO2 and other climate change gasses than we are doing or likely to do to stop it, and there’s some reason to believe we may be at the point where processes are now self-reinforcing, as with methane release from permafrost and swamps and the Amazon becoming a net emitter of carbon rather than a sink. As these new sources emit, they cause climate change no longer directly driven by our current actions and in doing so cause more emissions and that loop will come to drive more and more change.

That’s the situation. If we keep deaths to a billion people, that would be an extraordinarily good result, because these processes will also drive political change, including vast amounts of violence and waves of refugees which make the puny European refugee crisis look like a pygmy.

Welcome to the future. It’s here, and it’s going to get much, much worse.

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So Much Plastic Chemical Contamination in Rainwater It’s Unsafe to Drink

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On August 12, 2022

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Sigh.

Remember when you were a kid, and it was fun to tip your head back during a rainstorm and open your mouth to drink the drops? You shouldn’t do that anymore. That’s because you’ll be ingesting too many particles of Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS), the hazardous chemicals that leach from the ultra-durable plastics we’ve created for about the past 120 years.

Earth is officially past its safe zone for plastic contamination. The PFAS “boundary has been exceeded,” according to a study published August 2 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. PFAS are known to be hazardous to both the environment and human health. At this point, these “forever chemicals” are all over the globe and have seeded the atmosphere. Most importantly, they don’t break down in the environment.

This stuff can be removed from drinking water in various ways, but that doesn’t remove it from the environment. This also implies that drinking water from most, perhaps all, freshwater sources, is no longer safe. As a child in British Columbia and the Yukon in Canada, I often drank water from snow- and glacier-driven streams and rivers, but no longer.

Health Effects:

The health effects of PFAS vary, but include reproductive, developmental, and immunological problems. Since PFAS don’t easily break down and can accumulate in the human body overtime, the more exposure a person has, the greater the chance of negative health effects. The EPA has cited evidence linking PFAS exposure to the following:

    • increased cholesterol levels
    • suppressed immune system
    • thyroid hormone disruption
    • liver and kidney damage
    • low infant birth weight
    • cancer

… PFAS can be removed from water through reverse osmosis, activated carbon filtration, and ion exchange.

Ah, joy.

This is separate from the issue of microplastics, which are now commonly found in blood and organs of humans and animals, and which some bacteria do feed on, though not enough to have a significant effect yet. (We can hope that evolution, natural or human-induced, will create more bacteria which eats plastic.)

Based on these type of studies, researchers have hypothesized that human exposure to microplastics could lead to oxidative stress, DNA damage, and inflammation — among other health problems. Particularly, when inflammation becomes chronic, this can pave the way to very serious health problems. However, it’s not only the plastic particles themselves that are potentially harmful: The microplastic surfaces in the environment are colonised by micro-organisms, some of which have been identified as human pathogens.

Human pathogens have a particularly strong bind to plastic waste, more so than to natural surfaces. Research published in 2016 identified the human pathogen Vibrio cholera, which causes cholera in humans, attached to microplastics sampled from the North and Baltic Seas.

Wonderful. I can’t find the original source, but I remember someone quipping:

“Born too late to explore the world, and too soon to roam the stars, but just in time to have microplastics in our blood.

Of course in many areas, rainwater is still too acidic to drink, so there’s that — though at least the horrible acid rain of my youth no longer plagues most of North America. We exported the industry which produces it to south-east China and various other manufacturing domiciles.

The fact of the matter is that human society is simply incapable of handling the power we’ve gained since the industrial revolution. Even when we know we’re doing massive harm, we don’t stop, or clean up, and we lie about it. In my youth, we moved from glass bottles for almost everything (including pop, as they were massively heavy) to plastic, and said “plastic can be recycled.” But most plastic isn’t recycled; only about eight percent ever has been and it’s not easy to recycle plastic because it has to be separated into different types first, since each type requires a different heat to be melted and reformed.

What’s happening, with climate, pathogens, plastic, and far more is classic “sorcerer’s apprentice” stuff: We have power we can’t control, and when we use it, we do harm.

This is why even if all the “best time ever to be alive” books and articles were right (a questionable assertion, but it is true for many people), they’re wrong in a larger sense — it’s like saying, “Man, I’m staying warm!” as you burn down your house. Once you’re finished burning your house, you’re screwed. Except what we’re burning down is the environment which keeps us healthy, fed, watered, and protected from temperatures too cold or hot to survive, as with the infamous point where it’s so hot the human body can’t cool itself.

People often point to a study published in 2010 that estimated that a wet-bulb temperature of 35 C – equal to 95 F at 100 percent humidity, or 115 F at 50 percent humidity – would be the upper limit of safety, beyond which the human body can no longer cool itself by evaporating sweat from the surface of the body to maintain a stable body core temperature…

…Our studies on young, healthy men and women show that this upper environmental limit is even lower than the theorized 35 C. It’s more like a wet-bulb temperature of 31 C (88 F). That would equal 31 C at 100 percent humidity, or 38 C (100 F) at 60 percent humidity.

This temperature has been hit over the last couple years in India.

It’s a brave new world, and our descendants, and, indeed, many people alive today are or will be cursing us — and with good reason.

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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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