The Coming Climate Catastrophe
Newsreaders who pay the merest attention to the various collapse threads mentioned in the mainstream press have a growing sense of worry, as nothing seems to work anymore.
Even mainstream corporate media interrupts its narcotizing narrative supporting the status quo to include terms like “spot shortages,” “supply chain problems,” “climate change,” “firenados,” “runaway inflation,” and others. And now, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have “land war in Europe” and the threat of nuclear escalation. You’ll have to leave the paved interstates of the MSM and range far afield on the blue highways of independent writers to discover the underlying causes.
What links all the above-listed terms is the end of cheap energy. And that’s a story no one wants to hear.
You need no further evidence about the coming climate catastrophe if you’re scoring at home. Reasons include habitat loss, environmental degradation, fragmentation, overgrazing, soil degradation, human industrial growth and overpopulation, climate change, ocean acidification, pollution, and invasive species. To say nothing of mankind’s self-inflicted wounds, such as mining, fracking, and other extractive industries, each of which leads to widespread overexploitation and poisoning of ecosystems.
There’s an economic dimension to collapse as well. Persistent wealth inequality, trade deficits, wars, revolutions, famines, resource depletion, and hyperinflation are all factors. Also, economic sanctions, blockades, and embargoes cause severe shortages and induce hardships that are indeed perceived as collapse if you are on the receiving end.
We’re seeing the end of industrial everything in real-time, but it’s a process rather than an event. “Collapse” begins with entire sections of your grocery store being empty. When hospitals and schools can’t staff up fully. When trucks don’t make timely deliveries. When the drugstore runs short of medications. Or when you call 911, and no one answers. These underscore the folly and misfortune of our waste-based society, made possible by cheap energy.
Shortages stem from ever-cheapening dollars chasing too few goods in our “landfill economy” (thanks, Charles Hugh Smith).
The notion of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) is an idea I encountered years ago when investigating the collapse of society. EROEI is the ratio of the amount of usable energy delivered from a particular energy resource to the energy used to obtain it. To be considered viable as a source, a fuel must have an EROEI ratio of at least 3:1, with 1 being the breakeven point. Before you extract energy, such as oil, you have to build a well, which means you need heavy equipment, which requires prior mining, manufacturing, and labor. As a reference, the EROEI of gasoline has ranged from 60:1 to 40:1 in recent years and is declining as oil becomes more expensive to pump. Understanding EROEI is essential to realize why dreams of energy “too cheap to meter” are so much useless hopium. The cheap energy is gone, and what is left is more challenging and more expensive to extract.
Our conundrum is that even as energy is more expensive to obtain, it becomes imperative that we don’t burn it. We’re consuming so much we are in severe overshoot while poisoning our ecosphere. All of our indicators are leading to ecosystem collapse. We’re flying past tipping points, and sudden and radical disruption occurs when we do.
As the most pampered, cosseted people on the planet, fat on inherited, unearned privilege, Americans have lost sight of the fact that, seen through the other end of the telescope, inflation is actually currency depreciation of the dollar.
The dollar has lost over 96% of its value since 1913. $1 in 1800 is equivalent in purchasing power to around $22.13 today. Now confronted by an age of limits defined by no real economic growth, corporations must profit from consumers and debt-serfs. Ever-cheaper dollars are chasing a finite number of goods.
This expresses itself as shortages. At least it does before it expresses itself as food riots.
We couldn’t stop driving, flying, or using plastic when times were GOOD. Now that times are turning bad, we’re not about to allow people to take our cars, guns, big houses, vacations, hamburgers, and personal freedoms, away from us. We’ll fight tooth and nail to hold onto these talismans of “the American Way of Life.”
Recent studies show the 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years and the top four in the past four years. Scientists advise that climate action must be increased fivefold to limit warming to 1.5C.
The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, addressed last year’s COP24 summit:
“Climate change is running faster than we are, and we must catch up sooner rather than later before it is too late,” he said. “For many people, regions, and even countries, this is already a matter of life or death.”
Americans increasingly believe climate change is real, that humanity is primarily responsible, and that somebody somewhere needs to do something to fix the problem.
Two reasonably recent Yale and George Mason surveys confirm the public’s growing awareness of global warming. However, they also indicate that the issue is still not a front-burner and that taxpayers don’t want to pay much to rein in greenhouse gases.
The attitude seems to be, “Sure, I’m in favor of saving the environment, as long as it doesn’t cost me anything or I don’t have to change anything about my behavior.
An AP-NORC survey finds that 68% of Americans wouldn’t be willing to pay even $10 more a month in higher electric bills even if the money were used to combat climate change.
The survey asked people if they would be willing to pay a fee in their electric bill every month that would be used to combat climate change. Then the survey asked about different potential fee amounts. The survey found overwhelming majorities of Americans opposed paying the fee to combat climate change if it cost:
$10 a month, 68% opposed
$20 a month, 69% opposed
$40 a month, 76% opposed
$75 a month, 83% opposed
$100 a month, 82% opposed
The sad fact is that even though we want to hear ourselves say the appropriate syllables in response to a survey question, the majority of us have absolutely no intention of lifting a finger or changing our behavior in any way.
There is some amount that Americans say they’d be willing to sacrifice to defend the planet. Fifty-seven percent (57%) of Americans said they would be willing to pay a $1 a month fee in their electric bills to combat climate change. One buck. Less than a cup of Starbucks.
The survey was of a representative sample and was conducted in 2018, before the pandemic, runaway inflation, the most active hurricane season on record, out-of-control wildfires and “firenados,” heat domes in Canada and Siberia, alarmingly low amounts of ice in the Arctic, intense flash floods, and more. But you already know the drill.
We live at a time when a sizable minority choose to believe the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen (in the face of all evidence), that public health measures are an affront to personal liberty, when life-saving vaccines are avoided to duck The MaRk oF tHe BeAsT. Our neighbors are eager to line up behind an armed phalanx of neck-tattooed brownshirts to preserve minority white rule for a thousand years.
We are doomed because we can’t be bothered to change our behavior. A writer whose page is The Honest Sorcerer puts it succinctly:
The wealthy part of the planet must learn to live with much less energy to avert the worst of the ecological crisis. At the same time, the global south must also give up their dreams to live like Americans. No one on this planet can afford this lifestyle anymore.
And no one wants to hear it.
Americans routinely accept the wholesale slaughter of innocents in mass shootings from Sandy Hook to Parkland to Las Vegas as “tHe pRiCe oF FrEedUm.” A loud and noisy minority believes in the “Big Lie” that the last election was stolen. And many of these can be found among the Putin apologists and codpiece-nuzzlers in the US. We are just no longer serious people, but we’ll pay a serious price. Our plan will be to just turn up the air-conditioning when the summers get too hot.
