Weirdly, the OP has a genuinely interesting substack, that has no mention of immigration and contains no religious bigotry. They write through an Irish lens. They could be right about Islam's mistreatment of women. Thankfully, Ireland's religious institutions have no history of such things.
i'll venture to guess that the carbon pulse OP has spent zero years living within a strictly muslim community, unlike those of us who know whereof we speak. i'll further venture to guess that like many who generalize & stereotype, he conflates taliban-style islamic fundamentalism with regular bread & butter islam. given his comments on immigration & "incompatible cultures," i'm further convinced he harbors an element of racism toward arabic-speakers. it's a patronizing & parochial pov that sadly drives me away from sites with otherwise intelligent discourse on ecological overshoot. (& yes, i picked up your /s re irish religious institutions :)
I found this reply to be profoundly ignorant. The biggest victims of Islam - which is simply a set of ideas, really really bad ideas like gender apartheid - is Muslims, particularly female Muslims.
As labor might still be of importance, we are past a point where it's not so much a question of growth, labor or capital anymore. At least, it would still be a relatively long-term vision.
No. Now what our politicians are tasked to do is to maintain consumption at all cost. Starting with cheap products and/or (presented as) necessities consumed in quantity. So they need to have as many consumers as possible and to subside their consumption by debt. It is a short term plan but they have no other. Anything else is of no importance to them.
At one point, there might be a revolt. But a revolution cannot happen without young people. So don't expect anything like a French Revolution style one...
No argument that civilizational collapse is inevitable. The question is when. I would disagree with you that climate destabilization will not be the trigger. As is often said, we are just a few missed meals from anarchy. Any interruption in food production on a planet of 8+ billion human mouths will set off famine. The Holocene allowed agriculture to flourish. Now it is at an end and large scale cereal production is at grave risk to rising temps. People will not die quietly.
"The term collapse thus does not refer to a single event but an awful long period of time…"
With one huge, looming exception. I just read "Nuclear War, A Scenario", by Annie Jacobsen.
Total collapse could occur in just a few hours, based on the random actions of a madman with nuclear weapons. There appear to be several in such a position these days.
Nuclear weapons are not like a stick of TNT on which you just light the fuze and boom. They need the input of several people and codes to activate the multiple fuzes. There is a real chance that civilization just goes away and any madman would find the nuclear wahrheads to be nothing more than innert lumps of radioactive metal.
A very real existential threat comes from 'conventional' nuclear power plants. The Fukushima triple-melt-through has not been fully contained and may never be. Coverage of the facts was suppressed from the start, and is now almost totally absent from corporate media. The 'decline' or 'collapse' narrative must take into account the risks of all the NPPs worldwide, which require a very complicated system to prevent catastrophic accidents -- existential risks not directly involving weapons. We're aware, of course, that the 'conventional' NPPs are sustained in order to enrich the nuclear components of such weapons, so the risks are inextricably connected.
I haven't read the book, but did a quick bit of research on it. The fear of nuclear annihilation played the same role that the threat of climate change plays now. It was the simple, effective talking point that politicians and campaign groups could all focus on. I am not saying that nuclear weapons didn't/don't pose a threat, but times have changed, and I think that in the modern age of warfare, they are obsolete. What is still the case is that we will never know what is actually happening with nuclear weapons; the numbers, positioning, and delivery systems have always been kept secret, and are operated a bit like a shell game. The weapons (like the red bead) are shuffled around in a way that makes it impossible to know where they are. Watching the game are some vocal, ignorant observers, some others apparently independent but in on the game, sowing misinformation and deception, all of which helps create the confusion that keeps everything a mystery.
Also, it's worth considering the motivation of the author of books like Nuclear War, a Scenario.
I was a consultant with the USAF at locations referenced in the book, including South Korea. I worked with SIGINT and ELINT, which is about all I am allowed to say. The book included certain information that would have required a top secret clearance at the time I was involved — information that I'm pretty sure hasn't been declassified. Jacobsen has good sources that she directly quotes and calls out by name.
I think I saw perhaps a half-dozen things that nudged (if not begged) credibility, based on things I knew first-hand from my military experience. But if you count on everything "going right" in a crisis, I have nuclear plants in Chernobyl and Fukushima to sell you. Cheap.
Note that the book title says, "A Scenario", not "The Scenario".
You do betray your bias by comparing the possibility of nuclear war to the inevitable impacts of climate change in a derogatory manner. I note your stated bias toward the "positive use of technology" in your profile.
Civilization has a number of existential crises coming hard at us, one of which is, without any doubt, the impacts of climate change, of which we're only seeing the beginning. Comparing this book with climate change, implying neither is a threat, belies your clear understanding of either.
Including a link to a review of an entirely different book on a news source owned by someone who quashed that news source's election endorsement and who has changed their editorial policy to "personal liberties and free markets" hardly counts.
Sheesh. Please spend more than ten seconds on rebuttal sources for a book you haven't even bothered to read.
Most of your contrary statements are effectively rebutted in the book. Please read it before commenting further about something you don't seem to really understand.
To be clear, the reference in my bio, "the positive use of technology," is in relation to my current work supporting people with disabilities. I believe climate change is real, but it's not the only issue. It's "the issue everyone is happy to talk about," and has resulted in the defunding of anti-nuclear campaigns and a rise in public perception that nuclear power is the answer.
You might be unable to provide any evidence to support your opinion (I get it, protecting state secrets), but I can give you something I researched and wrote, early in my twenty-six years of environmental work.
So, I agree with most of what you write most of the time, which is unusual, for me, I'm a skeptical sort of guy. However, there is a flaw in your assertion of gradualism. The large cities are WMD, weapons of mass destruction. LA, for example, has enough food for 3 days stored. When the supply chain is disrupted, people are going to go into HSM (hysterical starvation mode) a few days later and react chaotically. There are about 6 critical systems (fresh water, electricity, fuel for transport, temporary food storage facilities, waste removal and storage facilities, workers to handle the meat, produce and other perishable) that keep food flowing in and removing wastes from the cities. Disruption of any of them will result in not enough food in the cities.
Many years ago (sometime in the 50s as I recall) the Mormons were commanded to store enough food for 2 years for all devout members. I don't know if that continues but such a plan would now be a reasonable resource for surviving.
Collapse may be very fast or it may occur, as you say, over many decades or centuries. My hunch is that it will be very fast and that most people alive today will see dramatic changes in their life expectancies.
But however fast collapse happens, there is only one way to act prudently; prepare as if collapse will happen very rapidly, as if modernity will go away in an instant, early next week. Then the speed of collapse will be irrelevant. You'll be ready for it, as best you can, however it happens.
And if we consider the environmental consequences affecting future generations yet unborn, it would be much better for collapse to happen very soon and very rapidly.
Where are our Ted Kaczynskis when we need them? Perhaps B can do a post on the best ways to facilitate collapse.
The roman colosseums original purpose beeing for 500 years and used to graze cattle is my favorite image how an epicentre of science and progress can turn into a basically abandoned ghost city in which people live among the ruins of this once great empire
The "industrial" house of cards is about to collapse hard. Will empires like the USA, China, EU fall back to warlord feudalism? Sounds far fetched, but it also sounded far fetched that Akkad, or Hattusa or Troy would become "legendary cities", or that Rome would fall, or Byzantium after it, or every empire that has ever rose from the dust and now sits mired in its own refuse, the detritus of memories. As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the end.
Disagree on oil. There are still unfathomably large reserves even within the U.S. that can be extracted at below 10% energy cost. And that’s not counting places like Canada with probably even larger reserves.
Thank you, Honest Sorcerer - another excellent piece.
David Korowicz's "Trade Off" paper is well worth factoring into the fast collapse/slow collapse debate. I certainly found it persuasive:
"Our assumption of gradual change tends to imagine that the effects of economic contraction, debt deflation, climate change, energy depletion, or biodiversity loss will gradually grind us down, snipping away at our wealth and welfare over years or decades.
"This may be so. However, all those changing conditions need to do is drive the globalised economy, or keystone-hubs within it, out of their stability domain, after which the system’s internal interdependencies come out of synch with what they have adapted to and the system can be at risk of collapse. The speed of that collapse is related to the levels of integration and complexity in the system.
"One of the effects of massive credit over-expansion and/or the peaking of global oil production is the growing risk of a global systemic financial shock. The likelihood, as with so many financial crises of the past, is that the breakdown of the global financial system will be sudden and catastrophic, marked by complacency and hope turning to fear and panic. It would happen over hours and days."
I wonder whether The Honest Sorcerer has any observations about research in novel (or existing but suppressed) energy-producing methods. C. A. Fitts, a sober analyst, believes that these exist and are in use in underground facilities built for a 'breakaway civilization.' Evidence for LENR and other technologies seems very credible. I hope THS and others have some knowledge about this topic.
The problem with humanity being returned to a 17th century lifestyle is that the vast majority no longer have the 17th century KSAs (knowledge, skills, & abilities) to function in that world. Even if the land could support them, billions will die for want of these.
A problem is the source of its own solution. If one believes this is what's in store for us, then one could take steps to pick one or two KSAs that could be useful in a deindustrial future and steward that info to future generations. That's what I've chosen to do.
In my opinion, the end of modernity will usher our extinction. Only a few hardly souls might be able to deal with the harsher, brutal conditions, compounded by increased pollution, lack of arable land (have you ever tried to raise crops on a previously-fertilized soil? Its microbiota is usually dead and take decades to recover). Worse still, radioactive elements, released by the inevitably neglected spent-fuel ponds and derelict nuclear power plants, will kill most complex life forms.
Notwithstanding that most probable outcome, your utopic vision of small, isolated communities living humbly off the land fail to recognize the violent, abusive nature of mankind; e.g., marauding bands, and powerful tribes set on enslaving other tribes.
No, my friend, this story doesn’t end with a gentle whimper, rather an anguish cry that leads to hundreds of thousands of years of earth rejuvenation.
I find this profound ignorance, prejudice & fear of Muslims very sad, though typical of many in the West.
B Honest Sorcerer, if this is the kind of discourse you allow in your comment section, I'm out.
Weirdly, the OP has a genuinely interesting substack, that has no mention of immigration and contains no religious bigotry. They write through an Irish lens. They could be right about Islam's mistreatment of women. Thankfully, Ireland's religious institutions have no history of such things.
i'll venture to guess that the carbon pulse OP has spent zero years living within a strictly muslim community, unlike those of us who know whereof we speak. i'll further venture to guess that like many who generalize & stereotype, he conflates taliban-style islamic fundamentalism with regular bread & butter islam. given his comments on immigration & "incompatible cultures," i'm further convinced he harbors an element of racism toward arabic-speakers. it's a patronizing & parochial pov that sadly drives me away from sites with otherwise intelligent discourse on ecological overshoot. (& yes, i picked up your /s re irish religious institutions :)
I found this reply to be profoundly ignorant. The biggest victims of Islam - which is simply a set of ideas, really really bad ideas like gender apartheid - is Muslims, particularly female Muslims.
As labor might still be of importance, we are past a point where it's not so much a question of growth, labor or capital anymore. At least, it would still be a relatively long-term vision.
No. Now what our politicians are tasked to do is to maintain consumption at all cost. Starting with cheap products and/or (presented as) necessities consumed in quantity. So they need to have as many consumers as possible and to subside their consumption by debt. It is a short term plan but they have no other. Anything else is of no importance to them.
At one point, there might be a revolt. But a revolution cannot happen without young people. So don't expect anything like a French Revolution style one...
Michael Dowd defined the transition from the Age of exuberance to decline as suffering.
Generations born during a period of decline will regard their circumstances as normal.
I'm of the opinion that decline is a better descriptor than collapse.
No argument that civilizational collapse is inevitable. The question is when. I would disagree with you that climate destabilization will not be the trigger. As is often said, we are just a few missed meals from anarchy. Any interruption in food production on a planet of 8+ billion human mouths will set off famine. The Holocene allowed agriculture to flourish. Now it is at an end and large scale cereal production is at grave risk to rising temps. People will not die quietly.
"we are just a few missed meals from anarchy"
In my opinion, "anarchy" would be A Good Thing™!
The vernacular is that anarchy is the same as lawlessness. But it actually means, "without rulers" *not* "without rules".
As net energy goes into decline, smallish, self-governing, egalitarian group may be the key to thrival, if not simply survival.
As it has been for some ~293,000 years of modern human culture.
https://techoreon.com/150-nobel-prize-winners-warn-of-global-famine/
"The term collapse thus does not refer to a single event but an awful long period of time…"
With one huge, looming exception. I just read "Nuclear War, A Scenario", by Annie Jacobsen.
Total collapse could occur in just a few hours, based on the random actions of a madman with nuclear weapons. There appear to be several in such a position these days.
Nuclear weapons are not like a stick of TNT on which you just light the fuze and boom. They need the input of several people and codes to activate the multiple fuzes. There is a real chance that civilization just goes away and any madman would find the nuclear wahrheads to be nothing more than innert lumps of radioactive metal.
Read the book. It is not as you assume.
There are dictators (and near-dictators!) of nuclear nations who could give the order.
A very real existential threat comes from 'conventional' nuclear power plants. The Fukushima triple-melt-through has not been fully contained and may never be. Coverage of the facts was suppressed from the start, and is now almost totally absent from corporate media. The 'decline' or 'collapse' narrative must take into account the risks of all the NPPs worldwide, which require a very complicated system to prevent catastrophic accidents -- existential risks not directly involving weapons. We're aware, of course, that the 'conventional' NPPs are sustained in order to enrich the nuclear components of such weapons, so the risks are inextricably connected.
I haven't read the book, but did a quick bit of research on it. The fear of nuclear annihilation played the same role that the threat of climate change plays now. It was the simple, effective talking point that politicians and campaign groups could all focus on. I am not saying that nuclear weapons didn't/don't pose a threat, but times have changed, and I think that in the modern age of warfare, they are obsolete. What is still the case is that we will never know what is actually happening with nuclear weapons; the numbers, positioning, and delivery systems have always been kept secret, and are operated a bit like a shell game. The weapons (like the red bead) are shuffled around in a way that makes it impossible to know where they are. Watching the game are some vocal, ignorant observers, some others apparently independent but in on the game, sowing misinformation and deception, all of which helps create the confusion that keeps everything a mystery.
Also, it's worth considering the motivation of the author of books like Nuclear War, a Scenario.
"Annie Jacobsen has a history of publishing sensational, conspiracy-driven books that sell well."https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/truly-unbelievable-tales-of-derring-do-and-gruesome-escapades-at-the-cia/2019/05/24/43a243fe-4f43-11e9-a3f7-78b7525a8d5f_story.html
I was a consultant with the USAF at locations referenced in the book, including South Korea. I worked with SIGINT and ELINT, which is about all I am allowed to say. The book included certain information that would have required a top secret clearance at the time I was involved — information that I'm pretty sure hasn't been declassified. Jacobsen has good sources that she directly quotes and calls out by name.
I think I saw perhaps a half-dozen things that nudged (if not begged) credibility, based on things I knew first-hand from my military experience. But if you count on everything "going right" in a crisis, I have nuclear plants in Chernobyl and Fukushima to sell you. Cheap.
Note that the book title says, "A Scenario", not "The Scenario".
You do betray your bias by comparing the possibility of nuclear war to the inevitable impacts of climate change in a derogatory manner. I note your stated bias toward the "positive use of technology" in your profile.
Civilization has a number of existential crises coming hard at us, one of which is, without any doubt, the impacts of climate change, of which we're only seeing the beginning. Comparing this book with climate change, implying neither is a threat, belies your clear understanding of either.
Including a link to a review of an entirely different book on a news source owned by someone who quashed that news source's election endorsement and who has changed their editorial policy to "personal liberties and free markets" hardly counts.
Sheesh. Please spend more than ten seconds on rebuttal sources for a book you haven't even bothered to read.
Most of your contrary statements are effectively rebutted in the book. Please read it before commenting further about something you don't seem to really understand.
To be clear, the reference in my bio, "the positive use of technology," is in relation to my current work supporting people with disabilities. I believe climate change is real, but it's not the only issue. It's "the issue everyone is happy to talk about," and has resulted in the defunding of anti-nuclear campaigns and a rise in public perception that nuclear power is the answer.
You might be unable to provide any evidence to support your opinion (I get it, protecting state secrets), but I can give you something I researched and wrote, early in my twenty-six years of environmental work.
https://nuclear.foe.org.au/wp-content/uploads/Silex-Greenpeace-report.pdf
Acceptance and then "collapse before the rush", deep adaptation or "live like it is your last years of life" ?
So, I agree with most of what you write most of the time, which is unusual, for me, I'm a skeptical sort of guy. However, there is a flaw in your assertion of gradualism. The large cities are WMD, weapons of mass destruction. LA, for example, has enough food for 3 days stored. When the supply chain is disrupted, people are going to go into HSM (hysterical starvation mode) a few days later and react chaotically. There are about 6 critical systems (fresh water, electricity, fuel for transport, temporary food storage facilities, waste removal and storage facilities, workers to handle the meat, produce and other perishable) that keep food flowing in and removing wastes from the cities. Disruption of any of them will result in not enough food in the cities.
Many years ago (sometime in the 50s as I recall) the Mormons were commanded to store enough food for 2 years for all devout members. I don't know if that continues but such a plan would now be a reasonable resource for surviving.
Collapse may be very fast or it may occur, as you say, over many decades or centuries. My hunch is that it will be very fast and that most people alive today will see dramatic changes in their life expectancies.
But however fast collapse happens, there is only one way to act prudently; prepare as if collapse will happen very rapidly, as if modernity will go away in an instant, early next week. Then the speed of collapse will be irrelevant. You'll be ready for it, as best you can, however it happens.
And if we consider the environmental consequences affecting future generations yet unborn, it would be much better for collapse to happen very soon and very rapidly.
Where are our Ted Kaczynskis when we need them? Perhaps B can do a post on the best ways to facilitate collapse.
The roman colosseums original purpose beeing for 500 years and used to graze cattle is my favorite image how an epicentre of science and progress can turn into a basically abandoned ghost city in which people live among the ruins of this once great empire
The "industrial" house of cards is about to collapse hard. Will empires like the USA, China, EU fall back to warlord feudalism? Sounds far fetched, but it also sounded far fetched that Akkad, or Hattusa or Troy would become "legendary cities", or that Rome would fall, or Byzantium after it, or every empire that has ever rose from the dust and now sits mired in its own refuse, the detritus of memories. As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the end.
Disagree on oil. There are still unfathomably large reserves even within the U.S. that can be extracted at below 10% energy cost. And that’s not counting places like Canada with probably even larger reserves.
Oil scarcity is a political issue
Why do steam oil out of sand?
Thank you, Honest Sorcerer - another excellent piece.
David Korowicz's "Trade Off" paper is well worth factoring into the fast collapse/slow collapse debate. I certainly found it persuasive:
"Our assumption of gradual change tends to imagine that the effects of economic contraction, debt deflation, climate change, energy depletion, or biodiversity loss will gradually grind us down, snipping away at our wealth and welfare over years or decades.
"This may be so. However, all those changing conditions need to do is drive the globalised economy, or keystone-hubs within it, out of their stability domain, after which the system’s internal interdependencies come out of synch with what they have adapted to and the system can be at risk of collapse. The speed of that collapse is related to the levels of integration and complexity in the system.
"One of the effects of massive credit over-expansion and/or the peaking of global oil production is the growing risk of a global systemic financial shock. The likelihood, as with so many financial crises of the past, is that the breakdown of the global financial system will be sudden and catastrophic, marked by complacency and hope turning to fear and panic. It would happen over hours and days."
https://www.feasta.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Trade_Off_Korowicz.pdf
I wonder whether The Honest Sorcerer has any observations about research in novel (or existing but suppressed) energy-producing methods. C. A. Fitts, a sober analyst, believes that these exist and are in use in underground facilities built for a 'breakaway civilization.' Evidence for LENR and other technologies seems very credible. I hope THS and others have some knowledge about this topic.
The problem with humanity being returned to a 17th century lifestyle is that the vast majority no longer have the 17th century KSAs (knowledge, skills, & abilities) to function in that world. Even if the land could support them, billions will die for want of these.
A problem is the source of its own solution. If one believes this is what's in store for us, then one could take steps to pick one or two KSAs that could be useful in a deindustrial future and steward that info to future generations. That's what I've chosen to do.
In my opinion, the end of modernity will usher our extinction. Only a few hardly souls might be able to deal with the harsher, brutal conditions, compounded by increased pollution, lack of arable land (have you ever tried to raise crops on a previously-fertilized soil? Its microbiota is usually dead and take decades to recover). Worse still, radioactive elements, released by the inevitably neglected spent-fuel ponds and derelict nuclear power plants, will kill most complex life forms.
Notwithstanding that most probable outcome, your utopic vision of small, isolated communities living humbly off the land fail to recognize the violent, abusive nature of mankind; e.g., marauding bands, and powerful tribes set on enslaving other tribes.
No, my friend, this story doesn’t end with a gentle whimper, rather an anguish cry that leads to hundreds of thousands of years of earth rejuvenation.
Brilliant. Hopefully, a few climate change campaign careerists read, reflect, and then jump off the bandwagon. Boycotting COP 30 would be a start.