There’s been a lot of attention, much of it apocalyptic, paid to Trump’s election, but Trump is just a symptom of one of our three main issues.
In order of importance, they are:
- Climate Change and Ecological Collapse;
- Mass disabling, largely due to Covid; and,
- The End of the Western Era, and the collapse of American hegemony.
If we manage a nuclear during the collapse of American hegemony, it’ll turn out to have been the most important issue, but I’m betting we’ll avoid it. If I’m wrong, you won’t be able to tell me so.
But just as important as warming is the collapse of biodiversity, loss of habitat and species. We are able to live and live well because other species form the network of life, which keep the atmosphere breathable, soil fertile and feed us. Worse, we just don’t understand these systems, we can’t create the simplest of biospheres: if it goes awry, we will have a hell of a time fixing it, and the loss of genetic diversity means a vast swathe of scientific advances will be cut off, especially medical advances.
(The below #s are from 2018, the situation is accelerating, and will be worse now.))
Average case scenarios for climate change and ecological collapse mean billions of deaths for humans a world with a significantly reduced carrying capacity. Recovery, especially of species, will take so much time that on the human timescale, it might as well be “never.”
Meanwhile, the Covid epidemic continues and we’re at risk for other viral plagues. If Covid just killed people, that would be bad, but the mass disabling is a huge problem and even people who aren’t symptomatic have suffered real damage.
This chart is from 2023, so it’s behind the curve, but it indicates the issues. (UK)
There’s no particular reason to expect this to end. We aren’t doing anything about Covid. Here’s a projection chart:
Having to care for large numbers of disabled people at the same time as everything else is going to shit is… bad. Very bad. There’s a reason why assisted suicide is becoming legal.
We could do something about Covid. Many things. But we refuse.
The End of the European Era is probably a good thing, but world hegemonic transitions are nasty. The last one led to two world wars. The Chinese are striving mightily to avoid “Thucydides trap.”
The Ukrainian and Gazan wars, plus the Yemen blockade which is part of the Gaza war are best seen as part of the death throes of the American empire. But it’s not just America which is losing power, Europe is shedding industry, has fallen behind on technology and is in serious, probably terminal decline.
The Western era, which is four to five centuries old, depending on how you count it (the case for 4 centuries is that in 1500 the Ottomans and Chinese were still vastly powerful) is coming to an end. China is re-taking its place as the most important nation in the world. I’d argue it has already done so. Russia, which has been Europe facing and European aspirational for centuries now looks East and is a junior ally of China’s.
China doesn’t want war with America. It doesn’t need a war. Absent a war, it’s already won, it just has to sit back and watch America continue its decline. Trump is not going to “make America great again”, that ship has sailed. What needs to be done to make it happen are policies (including real industrial policy and a collapse of asset prices and rent, plus increases in real wages) which are anathema to most of America’s elites, and which, in any case, they are incompetent to implement.
But hegemonic powers rarely go easy into that long night, and a world war is entirely possible. American elites don’t want to lose their pre-eminence, and they still have a powerful military (or think they do) and a lot of nuclear weapons.
So this transition period is one of great danger, potentially for everyone in the world.
These are the three big issues, everything else is trivial in comparison. Trans rights, wokeism, AI… whatever, are all rounding errors on these three issues.
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The worst of it is that we’re not going to handle the first one: climate change and ecological collapse. We’ve already made that decision. Even if we immediately started doing everything right, they’re now self-reinforcing, and we aren’t going to do everything right. Trump, after all, ran on drill, drill, drill. The Chinese are doing more than anyone else, with a massive build-out of renewable energy, but their system is still an extractive and polluting industrial economy with massive freeways and so on.
The only “good” sign is one that many are bewailing: collapsing birth rates. Human population is in clear overshoot, and it needs to be reduced. Yes, in theory we could increase Earth’s carrying capacity so that a massive population decrease wouldn’t be necessary, but we’re not going to.
Ecological issues are in the bucket of “fix them or nature will fix them for you” and we’ve chosen not to.
Keep these three issues at the forefront of your mind, your analysis and your planning for your personal future. Compared to them, everything else barely matters.
Soredemos
The thing with culture war issues like transrights isn’t that it matters (it doesn’t, systemically, though it matters to the people it mutilates or whose sports careers it ruins). It’s a cynical tool for distracting people and energy from real politics (literally, the setting of policy. Many languages don’t even distinguish between ‘policy’ and ‘politics’)
KT Chong
Not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, I think I have, but I’m gonna say it again.
Our planet Earth is actually a living orgasm. Oceans are its blood. Trees are its tissues. The lands are its bones. The animals are its cells. Humans are the cancer cells, and our growth has gone out of control and is killing the planet. COVID 19 was just the planet’s immune system trying to fight off the cancer, and the defense was unsuccessful. I expect us to see more attempts from the planet’s internal defense mechanism to fight the cancer: I expect too see more pandemic outbreaks.
By the way, the climate is also the planet’s immune system trying to fight off the sickness. When a human gets sick, she has a fever and her body temperature rises as her immune system attempts to fight off the sickness. The same is happening with climate change. The planet is trying to kill us off because we are a sickness.
Jan Wiklund
The western era is two centuries old. Europe overcame China and India only around 1800, says Andre Gunder Frank in ReOrient, 1998. The arguments are perhaps a little to angry, but they are mightily persuasive.
bruce wilder
I suppose people, being people, are always more or less, collectively and typically, idiotic.
Still, I cannot help but reflect on how remarkably disabled our politics is by a very low standard of education and analysis. I think this is true of both the “average” level of literacy and the elite standard of sophisticated, reflective thought. The ability of people collectively to reason together or to take counsel from those who can be reliably identified as wiser and better informed — that ability seems to me to be under sustained assault. I know this complaint maybe sounds like the raving of an old man, which it objectively is, but I am thinking that I see a lot of evidence that the quality of thinking on the subjects Ian identifies is seriously handicapped. Even, or maybe especially in elite publications, there is just a lot of ignorant dumb.
I don’t think much of the quality of polemics on climate change, even or especially that of people who have taken it upon themselves to advocate for “doing something”. It isn’t, imho, merely that they are getting drowned out by the propaganda of fossil fuel interests. The would-be Cassandras — large numbers of them at least — have been lazy and corrupt, ill-informed and in denial, all along. Lots of minimizing the difficulty of coordinating on political solutions, even before they started meeting in Doha! (Irony really is dead.)
The information vacuum on the Ukraine War is something I have commented on repeatedly. Right now, Biden giving permission for Ukraine to use their ATACMS (all 8 of them?) against targets in Russia (well, maybe only Kursk) because of non-existent North Koreans just illustrates the absurdity it induces.
COVID is just an knowledge and information black hole and was from the beginning. Elite institutions like the CDC have completely lost credibility and for good reasons.