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6th Mass Extinction, Adam McKay, Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropogenic Mass Extinction, Arctic Ice Albedo, Arctic Ice Melt, Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Celebrity Worship, Chemical Pollution, Climate Change, Climate Change Feedback Loops, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Commercialization, Commodification of Nature, Cryosphere, Don't Look Up, Doomsday Preppers, Dr. Randall Mindy, Ecological Overshoot, Elon Musk, Fossil Fuel Industry, Global Forest Die-Off, Global Warming, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Interstellar Colonization, Janie Orlean, Jason Orlean, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Kate Dibiasky, Leonardo DiCaprio, Loss of Biodiversity, MAGA rallies, Mark Rylance, Meryl Streep, Persecution of Environmental Activists, Peter Isherwell, Planetary Boundaries, Prof Tim Garrett, Professor Harold R. Wanless, Sea Level Rise, Techno-Fix, Techno-Utopians, Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctic Ice Sheet Melt
“I’m telling you that we’re putting our kids onto a global school bus that will with 98% probability end in a deadly crash.” ~ Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director Emeritus of Potsdam Institute
I recently saw the movie ‘Don’t Look Up’ after avoiding it since its release and I must say, that movie mirrors the tragic state of our society to a T. When you see Dr. Randall Mindy (DiCaprio) finally losing his cool, raging against a shallow, celebrity-idolizing, commercialized society on some glib TV talk show, this was not a stretch for the actor (an ardent environmental activist) who simply had to replace the oncoming fictional comet with the asteroid of abrupt climate change currently bearing down on us. At first, no one will listen to the scientist’s warning, not even the President of the United States Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) who is more worried about her polling numbers and keeping her campaign contributors happy than being bothered by an existential threat to civilization. Once tech guru Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) plants a bug in the President’s ear about how the comet could be exploited for its trillions of dollars worth of rare earth minerals, then all bets are off for deflecting the oncoming catastrophe. The creepy Techno-Utopist Isherwell reflects our own society’s blind worship of technology and consumerism as the answer to all its ills, when in reality they are only further alienating us from the natural world that underpins our survival. Throughout the movie, there are beautiful clips of nature that briefly flash across the screen, reminding me of what we are losing in our ongoing sixth mass extinction. Modern man and the havoc he is wreaking on the planet is happening in a microsecond when viewed in geologic time scales, but humans have trouble seeing it because we live an ephemeral existence, easily inured to an ever impoverished world.
Labeling the comet’s collision course with Earth as mere fear-mongering, politicians and TV talking heads manage to politicize the threat amongst the population, hence the title of the movie. Throngs of mindless people attending political rallies while wearing trucker caps with the slogan ‘Don’t Look Up’ reminded me of scenes from the MAGA crowd in thrall to their grift-scheming conman. Those who speak too much about the reality of the approaching comet are ziptied, blinded with a hood over their head, hauled off to an undisclosed location, and compelled to stay quiet by the authorities. In our real world, a fate much worse than that awaits those who oppose fossil fuel companies, miners, loggers, and others who are destroying the planet. Only when the comet and its long tail become clearly visible in the sky do people take the threat seriously, but by then it is too late. Back to reality, there’s no indication that such a tipping point in public consciousness has changed our trajectory towards ecological disintegration and collapse of civilization. Near the end of the movie as the planet-killing comet is colliding with Earth, Dr. Mindy’s family and a few of his colleagues are holding hands at their last supper and Dr. Mindy says, “We really did have everything, didn’t we?” The same can be said of what we are losing in today’s unfolding anthropogenic mass extinction. A thousand species a day, each a product of eons of evolution and designed for a specific purpose, being permanently erased from this planet along with any sort of stable and predictable climate means we are trashing Eden and descending into the hellscape depicted in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. This most recent study confirms past warnings:
“Drastically increased rates of species extinctions and declining abundances of many animal and plant populations are well documented, yet some deny that these phenomena amount to mass extinction,” said Robert Cowie, lead author of the study, in a press release. “This denial is based on a highly biased assessment of the crisis which focuses on mammals and birds and ignores invertebrates, which of course constitute the great majority of biodiversity.”…“Dedicated conservation biologists and conservation agencies are doing what they can, focused mainly on threatened birds and mammals, among which some species may be saved from the extinction that would otherwise ensue,” the paper said. “But we are pessimistic about the fate of most of the Earth’s biodiversity, much of which is going to vanish without us ever knowing of its existence.”…The researchers write that it is crucial to fight against the crisis and manipulating it is an abrogation of moral responsibility.
Of course the ones in charge, blinded by their greedy dream to profit from an oncoming disaster, surreptitiously escape Earth on a rocket ship, cryogenically preserved until they reach a distant Earth-like planet in the Goldilocks Zone of another solar system. This colonization of some other habitable planet by Earth-bound humans is a fetish amongst techno-optimists and futurists, but it is a pipe-dream not only because it is impossible due to basic biological constraints and technological infeasibility but also for the simple reason that if we cannot keep our house in order here on the planet that gave birth to us, we don’t deserve another chance. And for God’s sake, can Elon Musk stop ranting that humans have to get off Earth because all life will be snuffed out after the sun theoretically expands into a giant red star five billion years from now? Just as in the movie, our tech demigods will lead us over the cliff while planning their own getaway to a private underground bunker or second homes far away in some distant country. It is frightening to think that we are only seeing the beginning of this unfolding global ecological apocalypse that will affect every living thing on Earth. Nearly all past mass extinctions have occurred due to a disruption of the carbon cycle, only now it is happening at a rate of speed multiple times faster than previous ones and with humans serving as the architect of their own demise. In the last 500 million years, across 6 mass extinctions and the countless rise and fall of global temperatures and sea levels, the only time the climate changed faster was 66 million years ago when Earth got hit by a 10km asteroid that killed off 75% of all species. Mass extinction events turn freshwater bodies into toxic soup, and we’re seeing the same thing happen today. But fret not, technology will save us and stock prices are up this week, not to mention that our social media rankings are going gangbusters.
It has been said that when civilizations begin to die, they go insane. Perhaps Stoicism and Buddhism are the most useful philosophies in an age where the future is bleak and no one seems to be facing reality. After half a century of dire warnings from noted scientists, numerous Climate Action Inaction Summits (rigged to fail), revelations of decades-old climate studies from Fossil Fuel Corporations themselves proving all along that they knew, and worsening extreme weather events as well as the planet’s quickly disappearing cryosphere (what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic), here is where we stand today:
The world’s insatiable appetite for electricity is setting up a climate disaster
A report published Friday by the International Energy Agency found that global demand for electricity surged 6% in 2021, fueled by a colder winter and the dramatic economic rebound from the pandemic. That drove both prices and carbon emissions to new records.
The growth in demand was particularly intense in China, where it jumped by about 10%…
…Electricity generated by renewables grew by 6% globally last year, while coal-fired generation leaped 9% due to high demand and skyrocketing natural gas prices, which made it look like a more attractive option.
Carbon dioxide emissions from power generation rose 7% as a result, reaching an all-time high after declining the previous two years…
…The IEA found that emissions from the power sector will “remain around the same level from 2021 to 2024,” even though they need to decline “sharply” for the world to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid the worst effects of climate change.
As physicist Tim Garrett has pointed out, “Any new energy source adds impetus to the conversion of raw resources into the stuff of civilization, accelerating growth and future demands for all energy types. Renewables add to the consumption, they do not replace.” Also, gains in energy efficiency are simply supplanted by more growth.
Keep in mind that even if we were to magically reduce our CO2 emissions overnight, the opposite of what is happening, we will never again see the climate we grew up in. It is never returning. Realize that the current level of CO2 equivalent GHGs already exceeds 500 ppm. The increased pace of extreme weather events we are now getting from climate change is shocking even those scientists who predicted it. The Arctic is greening with the treeline advancing northward 40 to 50 meters every year from what was once an annual increase of only a few centimeters. Adding yet another pernicious feedback loop to the climate crisis, beavers are moving into the warming Arctic in greater numbers and radically transforming the landscape with their dams, further accelerating the thaw of permafrost that releases methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A worrying new study shows Earth’s ability to reflect solar radiation is weakening — as the ocean is heating it is failing to generate clouds that reflect back sunlight. Astoundingly, half of that weakening has happened in the last four years:
“The albedo drop was such a surprise to us when we analyzed the last 3 years of data – many scientists hoped that a warmer Earth may lead to more clouds and higher albedo which would then help to moderate warming and balance the climate system But this shows the opposite is true”
If this trend of Earth dimming due to climate change continues, climate models will have to (once more) be significantly revised to include this additional net warming. We are headed for a Miocene climate during which the Antarctic ice volume was half of what it is today and the Arctic Ocean was ice-free in winter. Sea levels were 130 feet or higher and temperatures were about 5 to 8ºC warmer. Our ancestors were apes at that time. The European shoreline was 120 miles inland from today’s coast and dense swamp-forests resembling modern Louisiana clogged coasts and estuaries in Denmark and Germany. Nothing living in its region today is adapted to what will come. Remember those trees in the Pacific Northwest that sizzled in the heatwave of last year’s summer? A new study paints a dire picture for their future, as well as ours:
“By some estimates, it’s probably the largest scorch event in history,” Oregon State University researcher Christopher Still told OPB’s “Think Out Loud” on Monday. “I mean this is a new thing for us to be seeing on Earth, so it’s sort of a dubious milestone.”…
…“If this just keeps going, if these are happening every five or 10 years, it’s gonna be really grim I think for most of the forests of the Pacific Northwest.”
As the saying goes, “Lessons in life will be repeated until they are learned.” And so humans have yet to understand their place in the world, punch drunk on more than a century-long bacchanalia of fossil fuel burning. In the end, nature will put us in our place, and not in a good way. It is interesting to note that right around the peak of industrial civilization’s collapse, humans will have evidently lost their biological ability reproduce due to chemical pollution. We have saturated the Earth with so many and so much chemicals that we have breached another planetary boundary:
The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet now threatens the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends, scientists have said.
Plastics are of particularly high concern, they said, along with 350,000 synthetic chemicals including pesticides, industrial compounds and antibiotics. Plastic pollution is now found from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans, and some toxic chemicals, such as PCBs, are long-lasting and widespread.
The study concludes that chemical pollution has crossed a “planetary boundary”, the point at which human-made changes to the Earth push it outside the stable environment of the last 10,000 years.
“There has been a fiftyfold increase in the production of chemicals since 1950 and this is projected to triple again by 2050,” said Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) who was part of the study team. “The pace that societies are producing and releasing new chemicals into the environment is not consistent with staying within a safe operating space for humanity.”
Pfft!!! Just another fancy-schmancy warning by some pedantic scientists for the world to ignore. No need to worry, we can live in hermetically sealed bubbles that filter out all that nasty stuff, can’t we? All of our socializing and entertainment take place indoors on digital screens anyway, doesn’t it? But wait, there’s more. The Doomsday Glacier is coming for us. The Thwaites Glacier is the size of Florida and it is cracking apart on the surface and melting from below, loosening its anchor on the undersea mountain that holds it in place. If this glacier goes, it could unleash much more ice from the West Antarctic ice sheet that is held in place behind it, causing an immediate and catastrophic effect (10 feet) of sea level rise. One scientist says it could go within a few years. This development falls in line with what another expert, Professor Harold R. Wanless, had said years ago about sea level rise and climate change—that sea level rise does not happen in a gradual and linear fashion but rather as sudden, large pulses. I blogged about him six years ago, and what he said back then in the context of what is happening now gives me chills:
…Subsequent ice melt was not a gradual acceleration and then deceleration process. Rather it was a series of very rapid pulses of sea level rise followed by pauses. These rapid pulses of rise, from three to thirty feet, were fast enough to leave drowned reefs, sandy barrier islands, tidal inlet deltas, and other coastal deposits abandoned across the continental shelf. That is what happens when climate change warms enough to destabilize some ice sheet sector. It rapidly disintegrates, resulting in a rapid rise.
Just a couple years ago, a study of ancient ice in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet showed that multiple meters of sea level rise occurred from less than 2ºC of warming at the beginning of the last interglacial period. As we are once again witnessing today, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is highly sensitive to collapse from slight temperature increases.
Circling back to the movie I was discussing earlier, there is a scene in which junior astronomer and Ph.D. student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is with a group of disaffected youth who are discussing conspiracy theories regarding the global elite, and Dibiasky says in an exasperated voice, “You guys, the truth is way more depressing. They’re not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for.” Perhaps the truth is even more depressing than that. In the grand scheme of things, free will appears to be nothing more than a figment of our imagination. Like microbes proliferating in a Petri dish and dying off after overshooting their confines, humans are essentially replicating the same process albeit on a planetary scale. Evidently, we are biologically programmed to eventually crash and burn. Just as with all other species, humans have the imperative to expand their numbers, exploiting all resources until stopped by environmental constraints, and those limits to growth are fast approaching as we speak.
It is not just the declining ERoEI of fossil fuel extraction that is the problem. The law of diminish returns applies to all human economic activities and technologies. Contrary to popular, we don’t live in an age of unprescedented technological advancement in 2022. That era was many decades ago.
The last breakthrough technology in the modern era was the invention of microchips in the 1960s that lead to the development of PCs (Personal Computers) in the 1970s and onwards. There has been NO groundbreaking invention since then. During the past 25 to 30 years, we managed to increase the computational power of personal computers, but that cannot be considered a breakthrough in technology, because computers are fundamentally the same as they have been for many decades.
And now, we cannot really increase the computational power of computers anymore because we have already reached the point of diminishing returns in that area too. Technological innovation is rapidly declining, and this has been the case since the beginning of the 21st century…there really isn’t anymore breakthrough technologies for humans to invent from this point onwards. And all modern technologies are still completely dependent on fossil fuels…something that will never change until industrial civilization literally collapses.
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***Contrary to popular*** Sorry for the typo…I meant to say “contrary to popular belief”
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This is a good article worth reading, explaining how capitalism accelerates the ecological crisis by wasteful overconsumption /consumerism
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/30/capitalism-is-killing-the-planet-its-time-to-stop-buying-into-our-own-destruction
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Such articles go without saying to this audience!
This thread seems endless, by the way. Many blogs become echo-chambers of doom and don’t accomplish much. The masses who don’t get the point are most in need of these reads.
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Sad state of affairs. All we can do is to not expect too much from deniers so that we won’t be disappointed. Just the other day I was talking to my neighbor,a Trumper, & mentioned all the weather weirding around the globe & he immediately jumped in & said he didn’t believe in global warming. The FREEDOM! to die dumb shall not be infringed. 😉
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This was my 2018 take on the general problem: https://falseprogress.home.blog/2018/06/24/why-saving-the-planet-is-a-lost-cause/
Pragmatic changes America could make are less engine idling, and getting rid of ego-coddling 80 MPH speed limits. 65 MPH to me is a reasonable compromise. 55 MPH isn’t workable with so many overpowered vehicles compared to its original days.
Oddly, you can get more people to see the logic of conserving partly-renewable water vs. non-renewable oil, even if they really don’t do either.
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I post links on Facebook to this site and other sites illustrating the unsustainability of capitalism and industrial civilization…yet most of the time, people ignore me. Most people are living in a state of willful ignorance and denial. On the bright side, at least some people notice these links I share on Facebook, so my efforts aren’t completely in vain.
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While we are in the Clever Ape extinction, how’s unregulated free market capitalism working out for those at the bottom of the economic ladder. How about those in the middle class? Maybe trickle down will reach them soon. Just waiting for; “When people lose everything & have nothing to lose,they lose it.”
I don’t know why I should be concerned when we have TARP, QE, ,~ 0% interest up to now. We need another tax break for the rich.
Hope the oil companies don’t go bankrupt! 😉
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Coming to a neighborhood near you. Coming from a neighbor near you?
https://bylinetimes.com/2022/05/17/global-banks-privately-prepare-for-dangerous-levels-of-imminent-civil-unrest-in-western-homelands/
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Sorry everyone,I’m on a roll today.
I understand some are a little unhappy.
https://climateandeconomy.com/2022/05/19/19th-may-2022-todays-round-up-of-economic-news/
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On the topic of which is the bigger issue…overpopulation or overconsumption? Here is my take.
Both are equally troublesome issues. On one hand, many people deny that overpopulation is even an issue. These people go by the logic that “most of the resources on this planet are being consumed by the weathiest 10 to 20% of the global population” (which is correct…the top 20% of the income earners on this planet consume nearly 80% of the natural resources). And “if these people consumed less resources, we could achieve sustainability”. Unfortunately, that statement is not correct because a) 20% of the global human population, of 8 billion people, is still an absolutely enormous number of people…that is at least 1.5 billion people that are overconsuming the resources on this planet. And 1.5 billion people is more than the entire population of the world up until the late 19th century (the global human population reached 1.5 billion around 1880, if I recall correctly). And even back in the 19th century, global human population and ecological damage caused by humans was already excessive, as William Catton pointed out in his book Overshoot. Even 150 years ago, humanity was already in population overshoot (overpopulation and overconsumption)…with a population of “only” 1.5 billion people.
How the hell are we gonna achieve “sustainability” when the population is now 5 times greater (and rapidly increasing every day by 200,000 people), with a much higher per capita consumption of natural resources… also with the resources on this planet now severely depleted? The answer is, there is absolutely zero chance of achieving sustainability…global human population will collapse sooner or later. And I reckon it will be “sooner” rather than “later”. I suspect a mass die off of the global human population between 2025 and 2035 (once the electricity grid and global supply chains permanently fail), and certainly before the year 2040. And very likely, the die off will be so severe that it leads to near term human extinction. I can assure you that the biggest threat to humanity’s survival on Earth is , by far, overpopulation and overconsumption. A nuclear war will make little difference in determining the fate of humans at this point. A nuclear war, at best, wiill accelerate the collapse of industrial civilization, but even if no nuclear war happens, humans are probably going to become extinct before the 21 st century is over. Primarily due to overpopulation and overconsumption.
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Yes, I = PAT remains a valid equation, and the P component gets buried under “racism” rhetoric, now that so many eco-groups have gone woke.
Neo-environmental groups also look away from obvious nature-destruction by massive “clean energy” projects, and those machines can’t scale up to the fossil fuels that build them. Sprawling development of open space is blatant consumption by itself.
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Do you guys agree with the following quote by John Gray? “the destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialism, “western” civilization or any flaws in human institutions. It is the consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout prehistory and history, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation” …I have to agree with his statement, unfortunately. Humans have been destroying the biosphere of this planet for countless thousands of years even before the invention of agriculture and civilization. The invention of agriculure merely accelerated the process of humanity’s ecological destruction. Industrialism is the final phase of human expansion on this planet before the collapse of human civilization…and the final nail in the coffin for the biosphere, leading eventually to human extinction in the not-too-distant future. I don’t care that most higher life forms will become extinct because of human activities…I just sincerely hope that humans cause their own extinction soon because humanity is an irredemably corrupt and unsustainable species. And I think the chances of humanity causing its own extinction is guranteed at this point…there is zero chance humans will ever send a man to Mars and colonize it.
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Very true. Blaming disembodied capitalism for killing nature is a standard “THEY” diversion by people embedded in something they pretend they aren’t part of.
Overpopulation denial is also a growing trend on the Left. They blame “over-consumption,” which only certain privileged groups could ever do. Everyone else must be a victim, not intrinsically part of the gluttony due to sheer mass. The P factor of I = PAT gets ignored in those arguments.
Lower-tech “third world” people may seem to have less per-capita impact, but they’re engaged in bush meat sustenance, exotic animal-parts poaching, palm oil deforestation and all the rest, drawing their incomes from global growth. Only isolated tribes are truly innocent now.
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Overpopulation denial happens for an obvious reason…especially when many of the deniers have one or more offspring themselves, so they are the cause of the predicament that they so vehemently deny.
Common arguments against overpopulation include the following: most of the resources on the planet are being consumed by the top 10 to 20% of the income earners on this planet. So it is just a problem of “overconsumption” rather than overpopulation. Or the fact that most of the deniers are scientifically illiterate, and don’t understand that people need much more than a place to sit and stand to survive. They make a ridiculous argument that: “the world is not overpopulated because most of the land on Earth is not occupied by cities and humans”. They make the ridiculous argument that there are almost no people living outside of big cities, and all of the land outside of cities is not being occupied by humans. What these people don’t understand is that all cities rely on extracting resources from the land surrounding and outside of the city. While cities take up “only” 2 to 3% of the land area on the planet, at least 50% of the land on Earth is being used to grow food for humans i.e. agriculture and live stock rearing…in other words, over half of the Earth’s land area is used solely for food production…and all this agricultural land is directly occupied by humans because agriculture exterminates all wild life (i.e. wild animals and plants) for the sole sake of growing food for humans. And another 40% of the world’s surface is being occupied by humans for other forms of resource extraction/industrial activity such as forestry, mining, fossil fuel extraction, ocean fishery and etc. The amount of “unblemished” wilderness is only 3% of the Earth’s surface. And what little remains of the natural world and natural ecosystems is rapidly being demolished and consumed by industrial civilization to sustain the needs and desires of the rapidly growing human population.
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Just look at Africa, South America and South East Asia…and the rest of the 3rd world…massive deforestation, habitat destruction, poaching, and biodiversity loss…most of this deforestation and ecological destruction is happening because of the need for more land for agriculture to feed the rapidly growing human populations in those countries. There is overwhelming evidence that deforestation is primarily caused by need for more agricultural land…for feeding the growing populations of the 3rd world. In other words, overpopulation =>more demand for food=> more deforestation and environmental destruction for acquiring more agricultural land to feed the growing population. It is really simple to see, yet most lefty “environmentalists” turn a blind eye to overpopulation. So anyone saying that third worlders are innocent and not causing ecological destruction is flat out lying.
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I agree that the planet is overpopulated. Some of your comment is not correct,though.
The rainforest destruction in Malaysia ,for example,is mainly to grow oil palm plantations. and the main use of that oil is biodiesel,so that we can kid ourselves that
we’re sustainable and green. Most of the rainforest destruction in the amazon (some
oil plantations there as well ) is for cattle ranches and soy or maize. What percentage of that soy and maize is feeding people directly ? I can’t remember the exact percentage, but I’m pretty sure that most of it is used for industrial meat production,and the target market
is overfed rich nations
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So where do the third world countries get their food if it isn’t grown on their own agricultural land? Yes, a large part of the deforestation in the third world is used for growing so called cash crops (like palm oil, sugar cane and coco beans) that are later sold to developed countries like Canada and the USA for fattening first worlders. But a lot of deforestation is also for the sake of growing crops used directly for feeding people in the third world. Also, keep in mind that there is a growing demand for deforestation in Africa to obtain wood for making charcoal used directly by people living in Africa. So alot of deforestation, poaching and other destructive ecological practices in the third world isn’t just for the sake of making money from exports to developed countries. Much of the ecological destruction is also for the sake of feeding and needs of the people of in third world.
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As for the date of when global oil extraction reaches its all time peak, all prominent geologists in the 1990s predicted that it will happen sometime during the first two decades of the 21st century. Some geologists (like Collin Campbell) predicted the peak happening around 2005 to 2008 because ~1/2 of all known oil reserves would have been depleted by then. The peak didn’t happen on that date because the governments of the world continued to frantically drill and extract oil from known oil reserves, thereby delaying the all-time peak of global oil extraction to about 2019. I assume governments tried to delay the date of peak oil for as long as possible because they understand the catastrophic effects of peak oil on the global economy. And also they tried to prevent oil extraction from entering the decline phase for as long as possible to prevent the inevitable economic contraction that would result from declining global oil extraction. But they can’t delay the inevitability of peak oil forever. The peak did indeed happen in 2019…as I showed in this Youtube video
Since I knew the peak already happened and oil extraction has already entered a permanent decline, I was not surprised at all by the continuous increase in the price of gasoline and diesel around the world. And the price of gas will continue to increase as global oil extraction continues to decline, because of oil depletion, and I can gurantee you this. And the price of all other raw materials (like copper, gold and aluminium) and finished industrial goods (like computers and especially food) will continue to increase because all industrial processes are directly or indirectly dependent on oil. And also other nonrenewable resources are being rapidly depleted (like copper and gold) because of the “peak everything crisis” .
As such, global economic contraction has already begun… meaning massive unemployment, poverty, ,homelessness , crime , misery and etc will increase, and continue to increase because of economic contraction. This misery will continue to increaase until the collapse of industrial civilization eventually happens.
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Global oil extraction peaked at 95 million barrels per day (mbpd) in early 2019. Now, it is only 85 mbpd. By 2025, it is predicted to go down to 55 to 60 mbpd. By 2030, it will be a mere 35 to 40 mbpd. It took about 170 years for global oil extraction to reach its all time peak. It, however, will not take over 100 years for oil extraction to decline to nothing because of declining ERoEI. And the Seneca Cliff effect…growth to the peak takes a long time, but decline into nothing is very fast. Once global oil extraction declines too low in ERoEI, oil extraction will completely stop because of economic and societal collapse. I imagine an enormous demand destruction for oil (caused by price spikes) and economic collapse will happen once oil extraction drops below 55 mbpd…meaning mass unemployment, poverty, homelessness, crime and etc skyrocket. Once it drops below 35 mbpd, it will probably lead to societal collapse. As in the electricity grid and supply chains start to permanently fail…and billions of people around the world will perish in a mass die off.
Just my two cents.
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As for peak oil vs the climate change debate, here is my take on that.
Oil extraction has already peaked, and is now in permanent decline, yet paradoxically greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase. Why is that the case? Because although GHG emissions from burning oil has decreased (due to peak oil) , coal burning is still rapidly increasing, and the extra GHG emissions come from coal burning. Eventually, in the not-too-distant future, greenhouse gas emissions will rapidly decline and cease because of the collapse of industrial civilization. But that will not prevent runaway climate change because humans have already irreversably disfigured the climate of the planet from previous GHG emissions and other industrial activities (like deforestation). And methane release from the Arctic, permafrost, boreal forests continue to rapidly increase because of the climate feedback loops unleashed. Anyone, who somehow survives the collapse of industrial civilization, will suffer from a continuously worsening climate.
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I thought that we already had a TV program called “Family Feud”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/georgia-republicans-despise-gov-brian-162124569.html
Not any worse than the Dems fighting the Progressives.
Everyone knows that political agendas will solve inflation,weather weirding & all shortages.
“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith
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The insanity of industrial capitalism is on full display everywhere we go. Everything from the non-stop production of mass-produced crap, to the non-stop advertisement of mass-produced crap, and finally the non-stop consumption of mass-produced crap…and humans call themselves “wise”? I am gonna to be honest with you guys…I don’t have any faith in this pathetic species called Homo sapiens…and I fully embrace the near term extinction of humans. Everyday that passes is one day closer to the collapse of industrial civilization. And yet, the insanity continues everyday.
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Nothing like a civil war to collapse a nation. There go the jobs, empty stores? Who is going to drive delivery trucks when one doesn’t know who will hijack/shoot them That might not be the new set of living arrangements the extremists right will be enjoying with 400,000,000 guns, some owned by the opposition.
https://nationworldnews.com/trump-shares-post-suggesting-civil-war/
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Hard to say who would be hi-jacking the trucks when the electricity grid starts to permanently fails. Here is a nice video to watch…to celebrate Victora Day…
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I guess one of the first targets in a civil war would be the enemy’s power grid/small local sub stations. How much security would it take to protect the grid? When the infrastructures start to collapse, wonder how the Worlds Greatest Country’s entitled population will deal with it?
Guy McPherson says that in the end all that’s left is love. I have to call BS. We might see all seven deadly sin on full display. Medical science has failed to deal with the violence gene. It’s going to be hard for one to deal with all the suffering when the one is suffering the same as others.
“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.”
— John Kenneth Galbraith
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At this point, catastrophic, global famine is very close…probably just a few years from now…famine on a scale that is unprescedented in all of humanity’s history. Killing literally billions of people around the globe before the 2040s. Human civilization is literally facing a crisis of catastrophic proportions within this decade…yet the mainstream media continues to tell the masses that BAU can continue indefinitely into the future. I do suspect NTE will probably manifest itself within the following two or three decades. Maybe Guy McPherson is wrong about there being no humans on Earth by 2030…he might be off by a few years…NTE might be post-poned a bit beyond 2030, but I am pretty damn certain there will be no humans on this planet within the lifetime of most people currently alive.
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I can’t wait for my plastic item, in a plastic clam shell, surrounded by plastic bubble wrap, in a card board box secured with plastic tape, to arrive.
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All the food and water we drink contains microplastic pieces…meaning we are literally eating and drinking plastic. And yet, plastic production productions continues to increase. If this is not insanity, I don’t know what is.
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https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/05/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-the-future.html#more-213148
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