A little bit of New Year's reflection.
I often have to deal with responses to my comments about where we are going to end up in a civilizational sense due to Climate Change and energy supply issues. The level of incomprehension I run into I must admit I often find staggering. The minimum wage stare (or written equivalent) otherwise called the deer in the headlights look is often priceless as they say, but also a bit disheartening. I often hear or read comments that indicate the person responding has never actually thought about the situation in depth nor has any understanding of the cause and effect of things. For them to hear me talk (or read what I have written) amounts to the equivalent of having someone say that they can prove God does not exist. They are horrified and I get immediate rejection not because what I have to say does not make perfect sense, but because if they listen to me and arrive at the same conclusions it means that almost nothing about the way they live their lives and how they view the prospects of the future has any validity any more. This is a terrifying prospect for almost everyone and is an individual example of the current global civilizational response to our situation.
So, where is "Here" and how did we get here? "Here" can actually be found just by reading my posts here on the Forum over the last couple of years in detail as well as the thoughtful responses to them. There is a large body of my work out there on this blog and others over the last 2 years that amounts to some 400 thousand words. So I not only do not want to repeat all of that here, but I actually could not unless I sat down and wrote a book on the subject (which I have actually spent some time on, but chose not to go forward with).
It will come as no surprise to anyone who reads my work that I hold the opinions I try and articulate with some strength of grip and tenacity. If those questioning what I have put forward cannot demonstrate a clear and deep understanding of the science behind the issues (physics), the engineering issues involved, the economic issues involved, and (biggest of all) the human nature issues involved, I do not feel they have any business advocating for specific solutions. It is like discussing world affairs with a teenager who, due to lack of education, life experience and the maturity of years, is just not capable of comprehension. They are passionate...but clueless.
Just below I will give a macro non-nuanced snapshot of where "Here" is. And then to the main point of this post - the journey from "There" to "Here". A road does exist and, while difficult to follow, it does connect the two places.
Here:
Climate Change is REAL and unequivocal.
Climate Change is the greatest challenge of human history
The number 1 driver of climate change is population levels
Population is increasing rapidly
Population levels are driven by available per capita energy supplies
The number 1 energy issue is EROEI which is in serious decline from peak levels
Human population is wildly over the Earth's carrying capacity
ALL cheap dense sources of both energy and resources are gone or dwindling quickly
The global environment is severely damaged and rapidly getting worse
The base of the food chain (the oceans) is in a critical state and collapse is on the horizon
Global food production is facing the headwinds of loss of top soil, water supplies, energy EROEI, sea level rise, unstable weather, crop diseases, etc, etc.
Economic conditions around the globe are supported only by borrowing heavily from the future via debt, exceeding the Earth's carrying capacity and living off a point source of millions of years of stored solar energy (whose use is driving climate change and must therefore cease)
The time when one could have conceivably started a global program to successfully adapt to and mitigate the above passed about 30-40 years ago.
It is no longer possible to avoid catastrophic climate change and all we are waiting for is to see how bad it is going to be. Everyday of our current approach makes the end game more difficult.
The fundamental driver of our inability to deal with the above facts is our basic human nature and method of arriving at decisions and taking action. It is hardwired into our brains by a few million years of evolution. For almost all humans there is nothing in our makeup that provides the ability to make rational decisions about anything more than short-term issues. We are fight or flight wired like all animals and even the most rational clear thinking human makes almost all decisions subconsciously and then justifies them with some pseudo-rational after the fact justification. In a group setting the above process falls apart completely and results in something that makes even worse decisions.
Civilization as we know it with its vast population, levels of resource consumption, staggering complexities and almost limitless layers of technology cannot and will not continue given the above. And it will not. Period. There is just no way past that statement.
Is the above the end of the world? No. But we are getting a different world. Pursuing BAU's via they be Green or Black is a form of suicide. I want to live not die (in a species sense), so I look on BAU proponents as purveyors of evil. As their path leads not to an optimistic future but to death.
The future: (to digress a bit here on what I think will happen)
"We" will continue to run BAU with a slow transition from the black version to the green version and it will make zero difference as the facts indicate. Basic human nature dictates this decision path. "We" will experience a dramatic civilizational collapse which will (over some period of time) result in a total population which is just a faction of our peak. That great die-off will commence within the lives of those who are under 30 years old at the latest and it will last for generations. Capitalism as a global economic system will disappear as it depends on economic growth, debt and cheap energy and we will return to older forms of economic structures - feudal structures most likely. Many technologies will disappear from use entirely due to the lack of resources and energy to maintain extreme complexity. Others will only be available to the few. Life will not end but it will return to more old fashioned forms of organization. Many of the most cherished themes of the highly industrialized and incredibly wealthy countries will largely fade from the scene - i.e. freedom, equal rights, feminism, sexual rights, religious freedom and so on - thus a return to historical norms. I do not advocate ANY of this. I just see it as inevitable as the world returns to the rule by rough men and we all become much poorer.
Finally we get to the main point. How does one gain the knowledge to really understand that the above IS going to happen in the macro form.
The Journey.
This is my journey. I fully accept that I am not a normal person. But I am also certain that I can add value in a way that, if not unique, is somewhat rare. I do not think hardly any are capable of making the journey I have made for a variety of reasons; mostly due to human nature constraints, but also due to the requirements of needing a certain kind of personality (which runs counter to many of those tenets of basic nature) as well as unusual life experience and a solid grounding in physics, engineering and the function of economic structures. But it can be done.
To begin with one must set aside religion as the source of miracles and the reason for existence. Accept the world for what it is and how it functions and that we are responsible for our actions. I got thrown out of Sunday school about the age of 10 because I insisted that the Sunday school teacher answer my question about if God created the universe then who created god. I still read books on this subject 50 years later. I washed my hands of non-rational arguments about that time and proceeded from there. I did not drift into a great love of science and math as one might imagine, but rather towards the philosophical disciplines. This is where the pinnacle of human intellectual achievement lies. All of the earliest great thinkers whom we think of as the early scientists, were from the philosophical arenas. Math as well as scientific rigor is an out growth of logic. I grew up in a family where I was one of the least intelligent in terms of raw IQ and our house reverberated with intense discussions of the why and what for. My father and both my grandfathers were engineers and my mother, who had a masters degree, was just as brilliant as my father. Needless to say I got my head handed to me on a daily basis for a long time as my mind underwent development. The only way to hold ones own was utterly unemotional fact based logical reasoning which included not only an understanding of physics and math, but also the underlying reasons that decisions are made and arrived at which seem to contradict clear thought. I, being a typical young idealist of the 60's, struggled mightily with this dichotomy of life. My brother, the PhD in math, multiple degrees from MIT, masters degrees in logic and computer science, helped me a lot by explaining to me that real deep thought required one to set aside the things in our brains that make us human for a time and to become just an impartial observer of reality. You have to divorce yourself from your feelings and emotions to think clearly and rationally. A very difficult thing to do and no one succeeds at it all the time.
During the course of my working professional life my job required me to combine my formal education in engineering and my background in attempting to think from a very rational unemotional point of view to help execute, plan and eventually direct actions which put at risk my life and the lives of many others, and which sometimes took lives. A government job supporting the empire. One thing you learn in this type of environment is that optimists die young. Your only chance of a high rate of success in such a job is to be a committed pessimist who is certain that if every eventuality is not taken into account and planned for it will go wrong and someone will die. Such an approach is the only reason I am alive today. It is fine to be an optimist about your chances of dating that smoking hot cheerleader in high school, but when lives are on the line, especially the lives of everyone, being an optimist is not just a sloppy way of thinking but is the definition of being a fool.
When I left the above very busy life in 2004 I started to take more time to study issues which had been nagging at my mind from my casual readings. The main ones being Peak Oil and Climate Change and, at that time and to a lessor degree, economic issues. I have a lifetime interest in environmental issues and was already well versed in them. I have a long familiarity with farming issues due to both my parents and my wife's parents growing up on farms. I owned and operated an organic farming operation until 2012. From 2004 to the present I have spent untold hours studying and thinking about climate change, energy issues and all the related sub-issues mentioned above. I have tried to apply all of my background to as rigorously work my way through the facts to see where they lead. I strongly think they lead to the above location labeled "Here".
In my journey I have found compelling evidence and help in many locations. Some of the most useful I am listing below. I do not always agree with all of what they say there (and while I will not tell you who I am there I am present in many of the discussion under one of my other internet names) and my conclusions are sometimes different. But often in a nuanced way and not as a large disagreement.
The Oil Drum blog - no longer active but available as archives. This site has a monstrous amount of information and data which, though it would take much time to go through and learn, can provide the best overall education in understanding energy issues, EROEI, the fossil fuel industry, economics, many technologies and such. It was one of the more rigorous venues on the internet in terms of using math, science and logic to explain things. If one works their way through this site one can gain a deep understanding of energy issues and supporting complex technologies. If you leave out the chattering media masses and just look at the body of work and the real world data of today you realize that the Peak Oil folks hit the nail right on the head.
Limits to Growth: The original famous study was published in 1972 by a team of MIT researchers (no my brother was not one of them) with follow up works in 1992, 2002 and 2012. Contrary to the BAU mythology about these works being wildly wrong they have turned out to be eerily prescient. We are dead on the track to the possible civilizational collapse forecast detailed in the 1972 work (forecast being if you don't change your ways this is where you are headed). All the subsequent works have served to strongly reinforce the conclusions found in the original and added along the way. Read these works. In forty years we have not changed the trajectory of the curves in any meaningful way. Proponents of BAU should think really hard about what is said in these works and what they are always choosing to support. You just can not sugar coat the phrase suicidal tendencies.
The ArchDruid Report. Yes I am suggesting you read the entire body of work on a religious man's site. John Michael Greer is one of the most gifted and articulate writers of today and provides perhaps the best line of reasoning on energy, climate change and civilizational collapse I have seen. While I do not agree with all of his conclusions (my most significant disagreement being over the rate of collapse) there is not a better articulated line of reasoning in existence on these subjects that I am aware of.
The Naked Capitalism blog. Economics, debt, banking, impactful news.
Read Jared Diamond and Joseph Tainter on the collapse of civilizations.
If you are very technical read the bulk of the RealClimate blog.
Read and study the issues presented on the blog Skeptical Science.
Read the OpenMind blog.
Read and study publications on food production.
Study economic systems and how and under what circumstances they function.
Observe the significant and continuing disintegration of the industrialized countries.
Study what is involved in the building of large complex technological systems. And note that the US is incapable of properly maintaining its road, electrical, water and sewer systems already.
Really think about the scale of change required to follow the Green BAU policies, the resource requirements, the time required to execute them, the need to service a constantly growing population, the fact that we have already passed the point of ending up with a climate catastrophe and declining wealth which follows declining EROEI.
There are many other good sources of course, but the above should be sufficient if one makes a real effort.
Our basic human nature tells us to run and hide from threats. Only when cornered do we fight. So that is what almost everyone is doing. They are hiding behind soothing rhetoric and sticking to some version of BAU because reality is so scary they cannot wrap their minds around it. But we ARE in the corner and we have to do whatever is necessary.
The point is not about someone being a bad person because they bring up a distasteful subject like the critical need to immediately implement rapid population reductions.
One is not a good person because they find such thoughts distasteful.
What is important is doing what is required to mitigate the massive suffering which facts and logic says is inevitable. We ARE going to suffer a civilizational collapse and a dramatic population reduction. Again. Just like we have had happen many times before. Yes, this time it IS different. But not in a good way. You cannot deny the laws of physics. This time we have foolishly exceeded our carrying capacity across the entire globe as well as seriously caused a significant reduction in the globes carrying capacity compared to the past and initiated a further large reduction in the future carrying capacity via climate change. There is simply no way out of the situation.
To continue BAU practices as long as possible (the choice of about 99% of the people) just serves to continue the burning of the candle from both ends. It in no way prevents collapse. It is highly probable that it brings collapse forward in time. But most importantly it continues to use up precious resources needed for post collapse reconstruction as well as making the end result of climate change much worse. Thus BAU versions black and green will result in the maximum amount of suffering. Not the least.
So I say that the choice in this discussion about who's approach to the problem is the most concerned with preventing human suffering, which would result in the least amount of harm overall, which would give the greatest chances for rebuilding sometime in the future, which is the most humane and just and moral...is mine.
