Something rarely mentioned in the discussion of inevitable forthcoming environmental & socioeconomic collapse is how millions of people (like myself) will lose their lives due to disruptions in the supply chain for essential medications.
I asked my doctor last month if there is a safe way to wean myself off of them if I, for whatever reason, could no longer access my meds. He flat out said "no."
This unrelenting senseless drive for economic growth at all costs means more of everything — more cars, more roads, more shopping centers, more cheap disposable plastic products, more waste, more factories, more fossil fuels, more CO2 emissions, and more global heating.
And that means more storms, more floods, more wildfires, more smoke, more droughts, more famines, more extinctions, and many many more deaths.
It's time to stop. Turn it off.
For us to have even a small chance of avoiding setting off irreversible chain reactions far beyond human control we need drastic, immediate, far-reaching emissions cuts at the source.
When your bathtub is about to overflow, you don't go looking for buckets or start covering the floor with towels — you start by turning off the tap as soon as you possibly can. Leaving the water running means ignoring or denying the problem, delaying doing anything to resolve it, and downplaying its consequences.
On the ex-Bird Site, Martin Tye, Director of the Australian Regional Communities Chapter of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (https://steadystate.org/) posted this crisp summary:
«We live in the dying gasps of economic growth,
... where it claws at the last of our resources, our ecosystems & our quality of life to feed it's terminal days.
"""
The destruction of the planet isn't a mistake, isn't a misunderstanding, isn't an accident. It's largely a deliberate process driven by economics and the material reality of the society we live in. Everything that we produce and consume in an industrial civilization is dependent upon the destruction of the planet.
"""
-- Max Wilbert
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
That's what's behind all the talk about "passive income" - that's just a euphemism for "rent." It's what @Rushkoff is referring to in Survival of the Richest when he talks about the wealthy wanting to "go meta":
A recent paper surveyed 59,000 people across 63 #countries and found that 86% said they believed in #climate#change – that action was needed, #humans caused it, it was a #serious#threat to #humanity, and/or a #global#emergency. Even in the country with the lowest agreement, 73% still agreed it was a serious threat.
The ice sheet is cascading/gushing at unheard of rates never dreamed possible at this stage of global warming, or at any stage for that matter. Greenlands ice sheets are cascading or merging with the sea. #climate#chaos#environmental#collapse
I love how for the last 30 years or so, economic reports have documented the collapse of any sort of middle class while trumpeting the improving economy. If there was ever a symbol for how the system is organized to enrich a few off the toil of many and to the peril of all, stringing this type of articles together through the years it it.
Please read this opinion piece by Johan Hansson, a theoretical physicist at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. Here are a few excerpts...
I find it tragic that the world is governed exclusively by economists and is driven by economics, which is not a natural science, but just a human invention. There are physical limits to continuous economic expansion – a fact that most economists do not seem to understand.
In my view it is crazy to think that uncontrolled technological “development” and exploitation driven by unbridled and increasingly unequal capitalism will save us. It is what has plunged us into today’s crisis in the first place.
After all, if you are sitting on a tree branch that you are sawing off, and the ground underneath is burning, the solution is not to switch to a better saw – it is to stop sawing.
Role models like climate activist Greta Thunberg are trying to save those who, for some reason, have not yet understood how serious the situation actually is. To reach the climate pledge of limiting global warming below 1.5°C, the use of fossil fuels must completely cease by 2035, with zero deforestation and a drastic reduction in other greenhouse gas emissions. Yet according to the International Energy Agency, about 80% of the world’s energy today still comes from fossil fuels.
There is one option to reverse the current trend and that is to abide by Earth’s natural limits. Governments need to realize that rich countries must adapt their production and consumption to bring it below what is sustainable for the Earth-system as a whole. The only alternative to a planned and controlled downsizing is a forced and catastrophic global collapse.
Haber-Bosch process resulted in humanity rushing towards these limits faster than before. Environmental footprint per human drastically grew since then.
You may be right about the genocide part, although that wouldn't be #degrowth as envisioned by degrowth scholars, but rather a civilizational #collapse.
While it’s too late to prevent #ClimateBreakdown and the #collapse of civilization, it’s not too late to prevent more violence and brutality like what we’re witnessing in #Gaza and many other places around the world.
Keep protesting. Keep resisting. Keep standing up for what’s right, no matter how much it hurts.
I was diving through old blog essays in search of something that I guess wasn't there. But along the way, I ran into a writing of mine I called Plutocratic Denial, that's maybe worth a visit by some who, like me, are frustrated by our society's inaction on Climate Change.
The history of capitalism is kind of like a rowdy teenager making bombs in the garage for fun. He blows them up, gets in trouble and has to stop, but goes back after a while and builds a bigger bomb... same thing happens again, two or three times, until he makes a HUGE bomb, and this time he kills everyone. Oops.
With the World Stumbling Past 1.5 Degrees of Warming, Scientists Warn #Climate Shocks Could Trigger Unrest and #Authoritarian Backlash
Most of the public seems unaware that global temperatures will soon push past the target to which the U.N. hoped to limit warming, but researchers see social and psychological crises brewing.
Part of me can see how much nicer our world might be without any humans in it. Ecosystems could find their own equilibrium, unhindered by industrial pollution. Species could expand again and diversify, free of competition from the endless growth of factory farms, freeways, and parking lots.
It would take much time, centuries or even millennia, for the sky to regain its natural clarity, the forests to regrow, and the rivers to run clean. Even longer than that, probably, for all of the plastic eventually to degrade and disappear.
But someday, someday… the Earth would once again be a beautiful place.
It’s a lovely vision, and yet I’m torn. Because to get there means the suffering and death of billions of people. I wish there was a way to prevent that.
Yes, getting the press and business analysts to admit and track that some part of pricing is not cyclic is key. Once people understand that a part of the market is permanently wrecked and that the wrecking ball will continue to swing, the conversation can change more easily.
A problem not described correctly is not ripe for correct/productive/relevant solutions.
Media across the political spectrum needs to be preparing the public for this in food because pretending it's partisan will not cause the public to reason well. It'll be like masks for covid, where the topic is just a tool to randomly outrage people with lies.
Yes, the insurance industry is doing a good job of waking up the financial markets to the effects of #ClimateChange and the existence of #ClimateRisk. Most big businesses must now be aware of the long term risk of #Climate to their business model. Even the US military are declaring it the biggest risk to security.
The capitalist system, however, based on continuous growth on a finite planet, seems determined to keep this information from the general population in case they stop performing their primary function of being good little consumers and buying lots of stuff that will be of no use to them whatsoever when it finally becomes obvious to the masses that #collapse is here for good.
For some properly researched and modelled figures regarding #collapse, the Journal of Industrial Ecology have published some research entitled 'Recalibration of limits to growth: An update of the World3 model'. You can read the whole article here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.13442
Note that food production is less than 50% of the 2024 figure by 2050. Industrial output is less than 25%. Population has declined by about 0.5 Billion.
OK, so maybe 2040 is a bit pessimistic for 'grow your own food or die' but please note that population is less than 50% by 2100.
I doubt there can be a "properly modeled" sense of human psychology in the face of mass famine in parts of the world unused to that.
I have to believe this will follow lines like climate science did where researchers/modelers are of the opinion that "conservative" means you don't model anything you just have a hunch about and you only include effects you can prove.
Consistently for climate scientists this kind of conservatism has favored preserving individual careers at the expense of saying just how badly these things can go, and I expect the same in these other fields.
So pardon me if I don't rely on proper modeling and rely instead on my own sense of how ugly things can quickly get with the wrong set of circumstances, as is happening with the fall of democracy. What we imagine to be stable systems have fewer safeguards than we imagine and perform very badly when ideal conditions are not met.
This is partly a direct consequence of the fact that capitalism cannot see beyond the end of its nose. I have many times observed in recent years that many celebrated gains use simplistic metrics to trade away safety, robustness, redundancy, environment/ecology, and social justice on a theory that price optimization is the only goal.
In effect, the system rewards fragility and cruelty and other ills if it yields short term gains because it assumes one can always cash out and move on to other things if that strategy fails, and there is no accountability for system-wide fragility such as we saw in covid, where masks, lysol, toilet paper, vaccines, etc. were in short supply when capitalism promises to do so much better than socialism by closing its eyes to obvious issues and assuming profit will win out.
Capitalism not only doesn't value safety and robustness, seeing any robustness against issues that haven't occurred recently as economic inefficiencies to remove, but it also does not value completeness. Profit is maximized by figuring out who it's economical to serve and knowing who is too expensive to serve.
I expect this will be a bad model for food shortage during famine. I see us shrugging off such issues from a government planning point if view, preferring to "leave it to markets". And I don't see how markets will do more than focus on price gouging, shich will lead to civil unrest if the missing item is an essential like food or water.
Once the public realizes that capitalism has no plan for regular people, a tipping point is reached where panic sets in and all processes start to be chaotic. Even small perturbations in normal will upset supply chains, which are ridiculously full of single point of failure and reliance on supplies from distant locations as if transport was free and nations don't ever shut borders out if either paranoia or spite or trade imbalance leverage or other factors.
When something like wheat fails, will meager yields be merrily shipped to foreign lands or held for domestic use? Will multinats be able to continue to assert dominance or remote ownership across national borders? Will militaries be invoked? By whom against whom? How does one "model" these questions?
I didn't read the reports you cite but unless you tell me what is modeled is a very stark and honest view of what capitalism, selfishness, and nationalism really does from a qualitative modeling standpoint, not from an extrapolation of past effects in questionably similar situations, I don't see how to trust it. I expect someone would lose their job or peer review respect if they modeled these things as likely or even possible. Better to rely on things for which there is data. But that will not model "black swan" events.
I've also not fully read all of Taleb's efforts in the antifragile space, but my impression is he says don't bother modeling rare events you don't know the probability of, and instead build structures robust against chaos. We've not done that.
We're entering a new space we have not experienced where externalities aren't being tracked but do finally matter in ways i personally doubt any formal modeling will get right. They'll expect "getting it right" to be a conversation that can gradually converge over time in academic timescales we no longer have.
It matters to see potential severity more than it matters to be right on detail, like you'd model a war. Capitalism hates such planning because they think it overspends and cuts into quarterly profit.
Humanity making progress like it always does
Honeybee populations are soaring. Weren't they dying off before? ( www.marketplace.org )
Bird flu detected in person who had contact with infected dairy cattle in Texas ( www.washingtonpost.com )