Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 12 of 21

Are Our Elites Starting to Get It?

By

On August 1, 2022

Comments

Back in May, in Sri Lanka:

Recently, they also burned down the President’s home.

Meanwhile, the Canadian government:

The tax will apply to new cars and aircraft with a retail sales price over $100,000 and to vessels over $250,000. It will be calculated at the lesser of 20 percent of the value above a set threshold ($100,000 for cars and personal aircraft, and $250,000 for vessels) and ten percent of the full value of the item subjected to tax.

And the US Senate’s Climate bill, which Manchin approved:

The bill includes $60 billion to boost domestic clean energy manufacturing, including $30 billion in production tax credits for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and critical mineral processing. It also offers lower- and middle-income motorists a $7,500 tax credit for clean vehicles, while states and electric utilities would see $30 billion in grants and loans to expand clean energy. The bill also includes $60 billion for environmental justice communities and a fee on methane emissions that will rise to $1,500 a ton by 2026.

All of these are what I would class as “good news,” though insufficient. Adam Smith once quipped that “there is a lot of ruin in a nation,” but a country like Sri Lanka has less ruin than many others. England’s decline could be considered to have begun in 1914, and it’s only this decade that they’re likely to lose Scotland — and it’ll be a while yet before Brits start burning down toff mansions wholesale.

The problem with Sri Lanka is that almost all of the debt which is crippling it is to Western institutions, not to China (which is at about ten percent), but China is the country which will wind up bailing it out after the initial IMF stopgap, because China needs a stable country to have a naval base in. If India was smart, they’d step in instead, to deny the Chinese the base. As for the West, they don’t care and just want their money. China is likely delaying in part because they’d rather not send a ton of money to the West by paying for Sri Lanka’s debt.

Elites finally seem to be starting to understanding that climate change is serious, and that the rich are out of control. I think that the rich will come to regret the Russian oligarch sanctions hunt, because it taught everyone how easy it actually is to take everything from rich people, a lesson of the post-war era which has been forgotten because most who remember it are old or dead.

This is all very slim “good news.” With respect to climate change, I am of the opinion that we will not hold it at two degrees C, though some climate scientists disagree. I have found that the more “pessimistic” forecasts have consistently been more reliable, and I believe that self-reinforcing cycles, such as methane release from permafrost and swamps, and the destruction of most of the world’s remaining great forests, have been triggered. We can and should mitigate climate change by reducing emissions, but we have left it too late to contain catastrophic climate change. (I also expect a couple of marine inundations this century (colloquially, great floods) — and earlier than most people think likely.)

As for the rich, they’re still in control, but that control is unlikely to remain as firm as they expect. They were warned of this many times; that they couldn’t allow rampant inequality, poverty, catastrophe, and gouge on necessities like water, food, fuel, and life-saving medicines and expect to escape unscathed.

They key variable to watch is food, or rather, hunger. When people can’t eat (or drink), social controls break down. The Chinese understand that; every dynasty has known that if they didn’t feed the people, they were in great danger, and the Communist dynasty (that’s what it is, and it’s still essentially “rule by bureaucrats”) understands it as well. The Indian government, on the other hand, obsessed with fucking over non-Hindus and cleansing the country, seems to have forgotten.

The West, as a whole, has a great deal of agricultural surplus, and it will take some time for hunger to really hit, unless neoliberal ideology blinds politicians to the danger of continuing to allow rampant food inflation. If people can’t afford to eat, it’s the same as there not being enough food for them, and hunger leads to people with little to lose.

Interesting times, etc. Might as well enjoy the show as best we can, because we’re going to suffer through it as well.

DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE

 

The European Position at the End of the Unipolar World

By

On July 21, 2022

Comments

It’s hard to remember now, but in the early 2000s, the EU appeared to be the onrushing power. It was gaining new members, who clamored to join, both its economy and the Euro were strong, and it had avoided entanglement in Iraq. Its prestige was high (having nations begging you to let them in their club tends to do that).

What I suggested the Europeans do, at the time, was try and make the Euro into an alternate reserve currency. They also should have increased their military, making them non-reliant on the US in the guise of NATO. Within the EU, steps needed to be taken to stop the abuse of the Euro by Germany as a subsidy for its manufacturing (because the Euro was lower than a pure-German currency would have been) and to allow genuine subsidies in other countries to make up for the disadvantages they would incur as a result of using a Euro — which was priced too high. Aggressive moves towards energy independence would also be necessary, as Europe was –and is — obviously resource deficient.

None of this was done. It appears that EU leaders were comfortable being US subjects, or at least, they didn’t want to challenge it. Germany’s policy towards Russia was trade, sold on the assumption that trade alone would make them good little Europeans, without offering them a path into either NATO or the EU, and with the added insult of allowing and participating in the looting of Russia during the 90s.

As for economic policies like subsidies and some counterweight to German exports, well, that would contravene the neoliberal, technocratic ideology that very much rules Eurocrat elites: the rules are the rules and if your economy gets trashed by them, as Finland and Italy, among others, found out.

In 2008, the Europeans followed the Fed (and, admittedly, everyone else) into a gigantic bank bailout, then spent most of their time since printing money for rich people (a reasonable description of central bank special operations during that era).

Meanwhile, anti-Russia sanctions proliferated, Russia-EU/US relations deteriorated (especially due to to the fight for influence over Ukraine — but that was definitely not the reason), and it all flared into crisis when Russia invaded Ukraine after years of Ukrainian military operations in the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics.

That led to sanctions, which have so far hurt Europe worse than Russia, as the European (and especially German) power grid needs Russia natural gas and coal which they can’t easily obtain elsewhere. Damage to industry has also occurred, and some observers expect it to cost entire German industries and millions of jobs; nor is the rest of Europe unaffected.

The problem now is that a fast move away from natural gas, oil, and coal isn’t possible. Heat exchangers work, but there aren’t enough available. Renewables are great, but transitioning takes time and anti-Xinjiang sanctions mean that 50 percent of the world’s silica supply, along with much of its solar panels, are no longer available.

Meanwhile there’s a heat wave, Europeans don’t have air-conditioning, and live in buildings largely designed for cold weather (with some southern exceptions), and, as everyone loves to say, “Winter is coming.”

Transition is not impossible, but it will take time. It is going to require restarting any nuclear plants which can still work (the numbers do not work without it) and probably building some new nuclear reactors, along with a buildout of various forms of renewable energy. Even moving to imported, and more expensive, US natural gas is not as easy as it seems: it requires infrastructure which does not exist.

Russia, meanwhile, as we’ve discussed before, is restricting natural gas supplies and threatening cutoffs. They can’t buy European goods, and they need the money less than Europe needs gas, coal, and minerals. They are diversifying to the East and South as fast as they can. Add to that to their position as one of the world’s largest grain producers is serendipitous at a time grain production comes under pressure from climate change, and consider that they are capturing a fair bit of Ukraine’s farmland, some of the most productive in the world.

Then there is China. Europe does a lot of business with China and there are massive trade ties. But Europe continues its anti-China rhetoric and keeps putting on additional sanctions against China. China wants the European market, and there are still some advanced items they need to buy from Europe, but political considerations, especially with regards to Taiwan and Xinjiang, may trump such considerations. In particular, it is not in China’s interest for Russia to be defeated or broken up as so many in Europe want, as Russia is a key supplier without which China cannot resist a US naval blockade.

Europe finds itself in a position where it’s scared of Russia and outraged. Eastern Europeans in particular want a complete hardline because they genuinely fear conquest or Finlandization. Without reliable access to Russian resource, Europe is forced to rely on the US and various unpleasant Middle Eastern states and to pay higher prices.

And meanwhile, the simple fact is that transitioning to energy and resources without Russia is hard and will take years. I’d think a full transition, even if done competently, will take a decade or so. Combined with the need for the US in order to stand up to Russia (EU militaries are a joke, Ukraine actually had the largest one), and the Europeans find themselves completely back in US satrapy mode. The US is sending more troops and building bases and that’s how it has to be, if hostility to Russia remains.

Which means that the EU has another task: it has to build its own military, capable of standing up to Russia. This is by no means impossible: Europe is technologically advanced and still has the necessary industry, including world leading aviation, but right now all that is happening is buying more US made weapons and hosting more US troops.

If Europe wants to be anything but a satrapy, it has to fix it energy and resource issues; it has to build a military and it needs to do something even harder—it needs to rethink its ideology, and allow proper industrial policy internally. This is hard to do when it’s dependent on outside resources from a hegemonic power, but if it refuses to do so, it will remain an American satrapy.

How much of this will be done is unclear. Exchanging reliance on Russia for the US may seem like an improvement, but it is still dependence and if Chinese relations sour, the Europeans become “locked in”, with few options.

It’s hard to imagine the current generation of European leadership managing this well, but perhaps they will surprise or, more hopefully, perhaps they will be replaced by more competent politicians.

But overall, it looks like Europe is slowly marching towards its historical norm, less and less important and powerful on the global stage.

A lot, of course, will depend on climate change and who gets hit the worst and handle it the best, but right now Europe looks to be in decline, with an opportunity, if they take it, to use this crisis to come out stronger and less dependent on outsiders.

I hope they take the opportunity.

DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE

Russia Turns Up the Pressure (and Turns Off the Gas) on Germany and the EU

By

On July 18, 2022

Comments

Well, well…

Russia’s Gazprom has told customers in Europe it cannot guarantee gas supplies because of “extraordinary” circumstances, according to a letter seen by Reuters, upping the ante in an economic tit-for-tat with the west over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Dated 14 July, the letter from the Russian state gas monopoly said it was declaring force majeure on supplies, starting from 14 June.

Known as an “act of God” clause, a force majeure clause is standard in business contracts and spells out extreme circumstances that excuse a party from their legal obligations.

So, Europe and Germany get gas in exchange for rubles. But Russia can’t spend those rubles for most of what it needs from the West.

The question is, does Europe, especially Germany, need gas more than Russia needs rubles and an increased exchange rate (not always a good thing)?

Everyone has been concentrating on the winter and assuming Germany didn’t need much gas until then, but a great deal of Germany’s electrical grid is supplied by natural gas plants, and as you may have heard, there’s a heat wave in Europe and most of the rest of the world.

So much for air-conditioning. And if much of Germany’s industry will have to shut down as well.

Germany can lose a huge chunk of its industrial base if this continues. The whole “keep buying gas from Russia until we can transition off of it” idea was always dubious, because other gas is much more expensive, but it also rested on the idea that Russia was desperate to keep selling; that there was a symmetry of needs.

But Russia will suffer a lot less without sales than Europe will without gas, and in any case, a shutoff will likely increase the price of gas they are selling elsewhere, making up some of the losses.

The fact is that Germany, an industrial state without a lot of resources, and Russia, a resource state, are natural economic allies, but Germany needs Russia more than Russia needs Germany.

The companies who have been given notice that of force majeure are saying they don’t accept it, but what are they going to do?

The grace period for payments on two of Gazprom’s international bonds expires on 19 July, and if foreign creditors are not paid by then the company will technically be in default.

This is a non-threat threat, because Russia has already defaulted on loans, as it is largely shut out from the Western banking system and thus can’t even transfer the money. (As happened to Argentina.) More defaults theoretically mean that Russia will be unable to access Western loans and so on, but they already can’t, and they have access to the Chinese banking system, which is larger than any Western country’s and perfectly capable of keeping Russia and Russian companies afloat.

Understand clearly that most Germans and Europeans support the anti-Russia sanctions. This is a popularly backed policy: Europeans are paralyzed by fear of Russia and were long before Ukraine. I had a friend in Austria tell me how he scared he was of Putin back in 2016.

We will, however, see what the result of this is. I would guess that in the short-term, it will stiffen opposition to Russia, but I’m less sure about the medium- and long-term. German elites, especially, will feel a need to end the Ukraine war and get back to a steady Russian supply.

No matter what, however, it highlights the price Europe is paying for its anti-Russia stance.

DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE

Now That We’re At Peak, How Fast Will Civilization Collapse Be?

By

On July 5, 2022

Comments

Last week I wrote an article about the future of civilization, collapse centered around a graph from “Limits To Growth.”

I spent a fair bit of time staring at this graph yesterday, and I want to return to it, because it says some very important things about what’s coming up over the next decades.

The first thing to understand is that the future is, as William Gibson has noted, unevenly distributed. Sri Lanka is currently all-out collapse, for example.

The chart above is GLOBAL. Regional charts will be similar, but not identical and the time axis will differ. Some regions will collapse slower, peak later and so on.

The first thing I want you do is find the population line. Notice that it peaks in 2050.

Now, find the services per capita line. Peaks about 2020.

Now, the industrial output per capita. Also peaks about 2020.

And now look at the food per capita line, same thing.

But it’s not the peak that matters, go back and look at what happens after the peak.

Now, go back to those three lines and see what they do after 2020.

Not quite vertical declines, but very very steep.

Look at the food per capita line now. Go to the very right of the chart, then to the very left.

Somewhat under half the food per capita in 1900 will be produced in 2100. Move back a little and you’ll see it actually bottoms around 2060, then slowly recovers.

All three of the production lines have precipitous declines. The industrial production line manages best, winding up around a 1950 number, but remember that most of the world was not industrialized back then, just Europe, Japan, and North America. This is a world number. Next, consider the primary industrial nation today is China: don’t assume that it’s Europe and North America who will necessarily be the one with the big chunk of the remains: it isn’t going to be just a reversion to 1950 (especially considering the food collapse.)

Services come off the worst: services are, in most cases, luxuries. If we want to keep the important services like health care and education we’re going to have to prioritize them and be ruthless about cutting service crap we don’t actually need.

As for the good stuff, pollution peaks around 2035 in this model. Sounds promising and it is, but the problem is that we will be past self-reinforcing cycles at that point: methane release from permafrost for example, so climate change will continue. And as people become desperate for food, and they will, every wild animal, including the fish, and anything else edible will be plundered, so ecological collapse will continue and even accelerate.

Population doesn’t peak till 2050 in this model. Look down to the food line and you’ll see that food per capita recovers when population declines. In part this indicates a semi-permanent change in the Earth’s carrying capacity: some will recover, over time, but for a long time it just won’t be able to produce as much food for us.

Now, flip over to the death line. It goes vertical in the 2040s. Of course, the Club of Rome couldn’t model Covid, so I suspect we may get there earlier and the plague may help a number of these lines be somewhat better, ironically.

But do notice that when the death line goes vertical, it’s damn near at 90 degrees. A LOT of people are going die.

The population, death and birth lines indicate that deaths are driving the population decrease. I’m hoping that the births line is wrong, it goes vertical not long after the deaths line and that’s why the food per capita numbers remain abysmal. If we want to have even semi-decent conditions for most people we’re going to need decreasing population for quite some time. I’ve seen estimates that the world carrying capacity may crash as much as 80%. Hopefully it won’t be that bad, but if most of the tropics are uninhabitable we’re in a world of hurt and every estimate I’ve seen is that climate change takes away far more agricultural land than it creates farther north.

All of that before we get to the permanent damage done to our supplies of fresh water, which is a definite limiting factor. Even if we make desalinization work, well, there’s a lot of land that’s nowhere near the sea.

This is a chart you should spend time with, till it soaks into your emotional bones. Look at the shape of those curves.

This is civilization collapse. It is going to be very bad, much worse than most people expect.

The collapse has begun, worldwide. It’s not evenly distributed, but it’s here.

We are post peak. Plan accordingly.

DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE

One Chart To Predict The Future of Civilization Collapse

By

On June 29, 2022

Comments

I first read Limits To Growth sometime around 1982. Limits used computer models to predict possible futures of resource use, pollution and population over-shoot.

At the time I thought it was right, and everything since then has come in about as it said.

I found this chart from it, with a couple of added date lines in an excellent post on the retrospective book “Limits and Beyond.”

The chart’s a couple years off, but notice that we’re hitting the food per capita just a few years after it expected. You can say “this is because of the Ukraine war” but we were at the stretching point, which is why one war (and a bunch of stupid sanctions) were able to do this.

Note that services and industrial output are expected to peak around the same time. Population starts dropping in about 20 years and the death rate goes vertical about the same time.

Notice how extreme the declines and rises are once they get going. This should be familiar to people from the Covid pandemic, but these trends will last for decades; indeed for generations.

I’m not sure I entirely buy the population model. It’s based on the fact that poor people have more kids, with some delay, but I think the one things the Club of Rome didn’t entirely take into account is how bad climate change and ecological collapse will be.

The point, now, is that we’re about at the peak or slightly past it. The collapse has started. Covid and Ukraine pushed us into it, but it was going to happen anyway, and there’s always an inciting event. What has changed is that there was no slack in the system (and no competence, with the single major exception of China) to deal with it.

The second point is, again, how sharp these declines become, often almost immediately after they start.

Food isn’t going to get cheaper almost anywhere for a while. Then what will happen is that multiple countries which have surpluses will disconnect from the world supply network so they can feed their own people. This won’t be done for humanitarian reasons at home, our elites don’t have such feelings, it will be done because food shortages are the fastest route to revolution, and that includes food shortages caused by too high inflation. If the food’s out there any can’t afford it, it amounts to it not being out there.

This chart doesn’t break out water specifically, but in a lot of places water is going to be in serious shortage. We’re going to lose a lot of river flow and a lot of rivers and lakes outright, because they are fed by glaciers and snow pack which are already in precipitous decline. In some cases there will be an increase before the decrease: floods and so on caused by more water flow as glaciers melt faster, but then there will be almost none.

In many regions there’ll be more rain and there’ll be more rain overall, but it’s not going to make up for the lost river flow and lakes, or for the aquifers we have drained or poisoned.

This is the map, it may be off in a few places, but it’s going to be essentially correct. It didn’t have to be, the book was published as a warning so we could change our ways, but we didn’t and so it’s turned from possible prediction into prophecy.

Come back to this chart over and over again as you think about and plan for the future, but remember that it is a global chart: local areas will have different profiles and charts especially as we de-globalize, and in response to this collapse we are going to de-globalize with a vengeance.

There are certain places you just don’t want to be, which will get hit earlier and harder. In the US, much of the Southwest and south (Texas, for example.) In Asia: Bangladesh in the first wave, then India soon thereafter. I don’t know Africa well enough, but the same regional effects will occur there.

On the human scale there will be mass migrations, refugee waves of tens to hundreds of millions and war over water and arable land. Multiple societies will collapse into warlordism.

This is the future.

Our future.

DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE

Is Capitalism Near Its End?

By

On June 7, 2022

Comments

In the book Does Capitalism Have a Future?, Emmanuel Wallerstein argues that capitalism cannot be saved because capitalism requires the endless pursuit of profits, and the world system is at a stage where there is no room for another wave of exploiting people who are largely outside the system, which capitalism, in its modern form (from about the late 15th century), requires.

The ur-rule of capitalist behaviour, per Wallerstein, is that one must pursue ever-higher profits. If one doesn’t, they’re out of the game. (You and I, dear reader, are not in the game and never were, unless some billionaire or CEO is reading this.)

If you don’t pursue endless profit, you fall behind those who do, and they buy you out, or you go bankrupt, or even you become a small or medium business and have no real power. To have power in capitalism, one must be ever striving for the apex. It’s a red-queen’s race, as in “Alice in Wonderland.”

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Now, the next thing is that capitalists actually don’t like workers who fully depend on them for survival: they want workers who have other supports; generally some sort of subsistence or government support. Traditionally this would be workers in hinterland regions (in Europe or Britain to start) who still had some land or animals and took the work only to get some extra money.

Other arrangements did exist: You could pay them less than they really needed to survive (the early British proletariat, as can be seen from accounts at the time), or, in the modern world, you can be Walmart and instruct your workers how to get food stamps, welfare, and medicaid, as you pay them less than they need to survive.

Various other companies, including Amazon, who rely on similar supports and school, which is a form of babysitting, can be seen this way as well; workers who have to care for their own children 24/7 can’t work. Extended families, in countries which still have them, do the same thing — grandparents or other relatives care for the children while the parents work.

Each wave of capitalism has gone out to places where there were still people with extended families and means of subsistence, and brought them into capitalism. At first it was cheap, then wages rose as workers became proletariatized and wanted their wages to cover their actual expenses.

Getting government to step in and subsidize workers is a poor substitute, which can’t work in the longer run, because the workers still have to be supported. Even if a specific company is dodging all its taxes, someone is paying, and if that someone is the workers, well, that strategy is only viable while there is wealth to steal from the poor and middle class, because – obviously — taking wealth from the rich defeats the point.

The last wave, to Wallerstein, was this last wave: There are no countries of significance not in the capitalist system, and there is no significant group of people with extra-subsistence to bring into the system to support cheap labor.

Without this, the current form of capitalism is doomed. Profits can only be increased by impoverishing societies as a whole, which destroys the wealth customers need to buy goods.

Though Wallerstein doesn’t emphasize it, there’s also the issue of simple depletion of minerals and of climate change. There are plenty of hydrocarbons in the world, but using them is destroying subsistence, food production in general, and drawing down water, and so on. We are running out of other materials, almost exactly as “The Limits To Growth” report predicted five decades ago.

The reason people like Bezos and Musk are obsessed with space and automation if that if space mining, colonization, and automation are the only viable solutions can the resource constraints and the expansion constraint be broken. It’s the only way that this style of capitalism continue, possibly nearly forever, by expansion to new worlds, the asteroid belt and so on.

Unfortunately, with our current technology, space colonization is a no-go. We can’t even create a biosphere (a closed environment) capable of supporting anything more complex than mold slimes. We can’t deal with the radiation in space. Mars colonization without terraforming will be very limited; it’s a more hostile environment than Antarctica, which we haven’t been able to colonize either.

So, assuming you agree with Wallerstein’s model of modern capitalism, at least in its broad strokes, there’s no way for capitalism to survive.

If it is near the end, what you’ll see is a structural crisis with wide fluctuation. Change to a new equilibrium generally happens with snaps to the new equilibrium, then snaps back. At first, the snaps to the new equilibrium are brief — over time, they become longer and eventually there are no snaps back.

This is also likely to be the case for climate change, the question is where the new equilibrium will be, which is not as easy a question as some people think, because while earth has had high carbon in the past, conditions then were quite different. One example is that atmospheric pressure 2.7 billion years ago was half what it is today.

In any case, whatever the new equilibrium will be is unclear, both socially and environmentally, and how the social equilibrium sets will work is also dependent on where the climate stabilizes.

So at this point, we can say, if we find Wallerstein persuasive, that the modern form of capitalism, which has run progressively larger parts of the world for about five centuries, is on its last legs. What we can’t say is what will replace it.

The goal of those of us who see what is happening is to create ideas; ideologies, which will be available when change becomes so imperative that people are desperate, and reaching for new options. If we don’t, the worst people will dominate with their worst ideologies, and the new system could be even worse in many ways.

DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE

We Are Going To Go Thru Hell, So What Now?

By

On May 25, 2022

Comments

I was born in 1968, the year Wallerstein calls one of “world revolution”. It was a revolution that both failed and succeeded: women and minorities got more rights, often a lot more, but the end result was an oligarchy, where most people were equal in their lack of power, and where every year saw ordinary people becoming poorer, no matter what the official statistics claimed.

The 70s were the heyday of environmental possibility: everyone understood the stakes, and it seemed for a time that we would act.

President Carter famously put solar panels on the White House, and President Reagan famously had them removed.

And really, that was that. A lot of people fought, and fought hard, to stop environmental collapse and climate change, but really it was all over when Reagan and Thatcher took power and neoliberalism came to the fore. The ideology simply did not, could not and would not care about something so far in the future when there were rich people to make richer.

The larger point is that climate change is baked in. It’s going to happen, it’s going to be very bad. Numbers are hard, but I expect billions of climate refugees over the next 60 years, at least a billion dead, and probably more, and the collapse of multiple countries into anarchy and warlordism while most of the rest become poorer.

There are those who call this “doomerism”, but it’s simply a matter of facing the facts as they are. We are increasing drilling for oil and gas, not decreasing it. Animals and plants are still dying off; the Amazon is almost certainly past the tipping point for viability and is now producing more CO2 than it stores, while everyone know the Great Barrier Reef is doomed. In India we have ground temperatures in the 50s and 60s in May and the government has made it illegal to export grain.

There’s no stopping this. We will only act decisively when it is far too late. The glaciers will be doomed, etc, etc.

So, the question is what to do?

The answer is to stop pretending it isn’t going to happen and to prepare for it. We know there will be less water. We know there will be more heat. We know that weather will be more extreme, with more and more powerful storms and more rain in many places. We know that there will be marine inundations in low lying coastal cities. We know that we will lose our commercial fisheries. We know that far fewer areas will be suitable for agriculture and that most of those will be less fertile than they are today.

And so on.

We need to prepare for this. Start building the seawalls and the desalinization plants and so on.

Those who are concerned with the political future should understand that what will matter is who survives and how well. If a group you approve of survives disproportionately well, in both numbers and quality, they will have power in the world to come.

It’s no longer about some version of “save everyone”, it’s about “who will be saved, and how well will they be saved.”

You are going to have to make decisions: you are going to have to choose who you want to help live and maybe even prosper, and who you’re washing your hands of; who you’re going to let die, or maybe even give a shove. (I’m in favor of giving our elites a shove when the time comes, we don’t need the psychopath faction around.)

For a long time we’ve lived in a world where if we gave a damn we could have easily fed and housed everyone and given them healthcare. We didn’t, since psychopaths run our societies, but we could have and it would have cost nothing noticeable except to people who want others scared.

Soon this will no longer be true globally, and then it will be true in almost all countries, even ones considered rich today.

We talk a lot about what individuals can do, and what groups can do, but we rarely talk about groups. It is at the group level that most individuals can have the most influence: perhaps by creating communes or agrarian societies, perhaps thru churches, perhaps through other organizations like monasteries. Individuals, really, are always weak, but groups can be strong.

Look for those groups to join, or consider joining with others to create them. This is where your greatest point of leverage can be found and it’s where you can contribute most to changing the shape of the future to a better one.

We’re going to go thru hell, that’s now a given. But how will we treat each other while in Hell? And what societies will come into being at the other end?

DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE

Civilization Ending Long Covid Pt. 2 — 320K Long Term Sick In UK Labor Force

By

On May 18, 2022

Comments

Starting in 2020, an increase of 320K long term sick people. We tend to do percentages off the population, but the UK Labor Force is 34.7 million people. That means, in 2 years, what is probably most Long Covid, caused about a .92% decrease in the labor force just due to long Covid. Another .38% of the population left the UK Labor force for other reasons.

Where’d I get this from? The Bank of England!

Since end of 2019- we’ve seen a fall of 450,000 (1.3% of labour force- a very large decrease in labour force … The persistence & scale in this drop has been a surprise to us. We’ve seen an increase in long-term sickness in that number – around 320,000 people…

…Falling participation in the labour market is not a lack of job opportunities, but a rise in long term sickness linked to the pandemic. The issue of Long Covid is very serious.

Last week I wrote that a big part of rising labor costs was a tight labor market and…

much of why the labor market is tight is because they let a million people die and probably millions be disabled by not handling Covid

I’ve been emphasizing for a long time that Long Covid was going to be the real problem. .92% may not seem like much, but remember:

  • You can get Covid over and over again;
  • There is no long lasting or complete immunity from Covid either from vaccines or natural immunity;
  • New variants are being born all the time and the ones which survive and thirve are generally optimized against whatever is the biggest barrier to current spread;
  • Each time you get Covid you can get long term damage. It may not be sympomatic, but it’s there.
  • So the next time you get Covid, you’re more likely to get symptomatic Long Covid.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that UK and US reductions in the labor force are about the same, in percentage terms. (Death rates in the UK are slightly lower than the US, but I don’t trust either country’s stats all that much.)

The US Labor force in 2021 was about 161.2 million. Multiply that by .0092 and we have a reduction of approximately 1 million, four hundred and eight-three thousand people (1.483 million). Now, imagine the US loses that number of people from the workforce every two years?

Doesn’t take long from those numbers to be catastrophic, does it?

Understand that marginal rates control the capitalist market.

The good side of this is that taking so many people out of the workforce absolutely will increase wages without wage controls. And it will keep doing so for as long as we refuse to control Long Covid and have no effective AND widely deployed cure. Problem is, while we do way too much bullshit labor and could get by with less workers, I doubt it’s going to be Wall Street parasites whose jobs we don’t fill, it’ll be people who actually make, grow, mine or distribute goods that matter, and people like nurses and orderlies and teachers and so on who are actually productive, rather than parasites at best.

Meanwhile, China, who supposedly wrecked their economy with Zero-Covid, will not be suffering under this reduction. (The Shanghai outbreak is now almost completely under control, much to the dismay of pro-death and disabling neoliberals.)

And this is before the fact that we will need to take care of all those sick people, though I suppose the American solution will be to let them use up all their savings, get thrown off any private healthcare, perhaps manage to get on Medicaid and eventually wind up on the street and die.

Blah, blah, blah.

The point is that our civilization CANNOT survive this sort of disabling if it just keeps going on and on. Multiply by all the problems we’re going to have with climate change, and stir in a mix of nuclear-armed Great Power competition and the results are catastrophic.

It’s Long Covid or a real cure or a miracle where Covid dies out by itself (not seeing how that happens when natural immunity is limited), or we are in for a world of hurt.

Take precautions. It’s not death you should worry about, it’s disabling. I don’t know what happens after death, but I do know that a lot of very bad things can happen to you while you’re still alive.

DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE

Page 12 of 21

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén