Category: Environment Page 4 of 15

Most Zero Sum Games Are Negative Sum & So Are Most Positive-Sum Games

On August 24, 2022

In economics there’s the idea of how much a “game” nets, where a game is any economic activity. The ideal is to have positive sum games, where more good comes from the game than bad, and ideally all players of the game win. A classic zero-sum game is if you and I bet $10 on a coin flip: any win is precisely mirrored by loss. And a negative sum game is where people come out worse: a lot of wars are like this, no matter how much plunder, both sides are worse off at the end.

Just because a game is negative sum doesn’t mean it can’t be positive sum for a few people. War, again, is often like this. Masses of people may be killed, huge amounts of wealth destroyed and certain war profiteers may come out much richer and some politicians or generals much more powerful. Some soldiers may loot enough that war was better for them than peace.

The fundamental environmental critique of capitalism and industrialization is that it only looks like a positive sum game: that the damage we are doing to the environment (which includes climate change, but not just that) and to our health, makes it a negative sum game if one uses the proper time horizon (aka. if you won’t die before the bill becomes due) or if you include everyone (aka. being conquered by Britain was not good for Indians; being conquered mostly Europeans was not good for native North Americans, almost all of whom died) and capitalism has not been a marvel for most of the third world. Which is why, by the way, there are all those “best time to be alive ever” books which try to use dubious extreme poverty statistics to claim this is the closest we’ve ever gotten to utopia: they want to argue that capitalism and industrialization are positive sum games, at least for now.

These folks have no real argument against climate change and environmental collapse and tend to hand wave it with “technology will fix it” as if technology can un-extinct half the world’s species.

So in the big picture we’ve been playing a negative sum game for a long time. The destruction of the native civilizations of North America was a negative sum game. The impoverishment of India under the British East India company was a negative sum game (India started out with more industry than England, by a fairly wide margin.) Africa’s exploitation, from the slave trade to colonization was a negative sum game, which is not to deny they didn’t get some railroads and whatnot out of it. (The Belgians were the worst, but the French who are still making African nations pay them for having been conquered are mighty bad. England’s evils are well known.)

But we’re in a lot of local negative sum games. Wall Street types like to brag they “eat what they kill” and it’s accurate in all sorts of way. The entire run-up to 2008 was negative-sum: that’s why it took trillions to bail them out. All their profits came from creating much larger losses than their profits, then having other people pay them off and suffer a long light depression. And Central banks didn’t then go on to print trillions more because value was being produced after 2008, they had to print to keep covering the fact that real economic value was being destroyed.

Your average Wall Street executive is a sort of super-optimized human locust, getting fat by destroying real value. Private Equity as a whole is so clearly massively negative sum that if you try to deny it you live so far in a fantasy world there’s no point in talking. The entire neoliberal movement, with its poster-child policy of austerity was and is about damaging the real economy to make a small number of people richer.

A lot like those war profiteers we discussed earlier: they cause widespread misery, illness and death but they get very rich doing so.

(The military industrial complex is obviously negative sum, which, again, doesn’t mean it doesn’t benefit some people.)

The job of governments is to create positive sum games and to stop negative sum games. In some ways that’s almost their only legitimate function. (Any crime system with high recidivism, or large numbers incarcerated is negative sum, by the way, but boy, a lot of people get rich locking other people up.)

A society with a lot of negative sum games running can be compared to an animal with a lot of ticks attached, a tapeworm, and some nasty diseases. It’s supporting a lot of parasites, but one day it falls over dead after a great deal of suffering, and then the parasite have to try to find a new host. If they can’t, because they’ve infected the entire herd (or destroyed the grazing land), well, then they too die.

Welcome to the fin de siecle of capitalist society.

The Trifecta+ Which Will Make The Next 100 Years Hell

On August 19, 2022

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

We have three major challenges all coming to peak close to each other.

Or possibly four, depending on how you define your terms.

First: the end of a sub-ideological era. Neoliberalism is on its last legs, just as New Deal liberalism was in the 70s. Ends of sub-ideologies tend to be tumultuous and it’s worse when it’s the end of a fundamentally extractive sub-ideology like neoliberalism, than it is with the end of a “building” ideology like the New Deal which worked to strengthen people, regulate companies and build vast human and inanimate infrastructure.

Neoliberalism was, fundamentally, the realization that all that build-up led to a huge looting opportunity. Get rid of the regulations, stop enforcing anti-oligopoly laws, force massive asset bubbles and those on the inside could get stinking rich.

The New Deal was a reaction to the problems created by a certain type of exploitative capitalism: a “we can’t allow this sort of abuse”, where neoliberalism was “man, abusing people, and destroying/privatizing institutions makes a lot of money.”

So, the 70s sucked, but they were nothing near as bad as the great depression and WWII.

But that’s also because the transition to neoliberalsim did not coincide with—

Second: the end of a hegemonic era. 1914 to 1945 is the end of not just British but European world hegemony. At the end WWII the USSR and US divide Europe in half, with the US controlling the Western half and the USSR the eastern. That the America glove was often velvet, did not change the fact that there was a steel gauntlet underneath (look up Gladio, as an example.)

The death tolls of WWI (21m), II(50m) and the Great Depression (uncounted), plus the anti-colonial wars, famines and the Japanese conquests(14m) and colonial wars is in excess of a 100 million. At the end of WWII, the world population was about 1.33 billion people. That’s a lot dead people and we aren’t counting all the people who were maimed, impoverished, made into refugees, raped or tortured. Nor are we counting the USSR pogroms (we probably should) or the colonial famines (we probably should.)

Hegemonic powers do not go easy into the sunset, and the more powerful they were, the harder they die.

But although there were some serious environmental problems in this era (the dust bowl, for example), the simultaneous end of the hegemonic and sub-ideological cycles which occurred in the early 20th century (which includes communism), didn’t have what we have coming—

Third: a worldwide environmental crisis which will reduce the Earth’s carrying capacity semi-permanently. At best reversal will take hundreds of years and be partial, because we aren’t going to be able to un-extinct all the species we’re killing and the depth and vibrancy of the ecological web is a huge part of Earth’s biological carrying capacity.

So, we can reasonably expect that a significantly greater proportion of the Earth’s human population will die during the upcoming period and more people will be impoverished, tortured, raped, turned into refugees and so on. It is not impossible to imagine a scenario where that didn’t happen, but it requires human social groups to act with decisiveness, wisdom, compassion and forethought which have no precedent in human history I am aware of.

These is what I’ve partially labelled in my categories as “The Age of War and Revolution” and “The Twilight of Neoliberalism”, but they are much larger than that.

Now there is also a larger cycle coming. You’ll note that I kept calling New Deal Capitalism and Neoliberalism sub-ideologies. They’re both capitalist ideologies, and the capitalist world-system has been around since the late 15th century, blossoming with the industrial revolution into a global world-system. Previous to this, contradicting the name, most world-systems didn’t cover the entire globe, but capitalism did. Even communism was part of the system (that’s an entire other article, but the USSR was not in autarchy and was forced to play the game by capitalist world rules.)

Capitalism is ending. There are a bunch of reasons (follow the prior link), but one big part of it is simply that it’s going to have been seen to have failed and be blamed by everyone for the environmental crisis (it’s not just a climate crisis, ecological collapse is at least as important). Democracy stands a chance of getting it in the neck too.

We aren’t just going to be changing sub-ideologies and swapping hegemonic powers and dealing with an enviro-collapse; we are going to be changing how we fundamentally run our societies, because it is almost certain that you can’t be capitalist and fix the environment, and in any case, again, capitalism will totally be discredited by all the deaths and catastrophes during this era.

Likewise, we are going to have to transition from the hydrocarbon era which has run since near the start of the industrial revolution because we cannot fix our environmental issues and have hydrocarbons be our primary energy source.

So, depending on whether you count the transition from capitalism to whatever, we’ve got the end of 5 eras or so. (WWI to II also saw a sub-transition in energy, from coal and steam engines to oil and internal combustion.)

This is compounded by the fact that end of sub-ideological and ideological eras always occurs with fanatically incompetent elites in charge. The classic western example is the fall of Rome, but look at the Weimar Republic, at Hoover, at Nixon/Ford/Carter and so on. The generations who created the previous system are dead or out of power and their heirs are boobs who don’t know how to repair their system. When the Lost generation, the last generation to remember the 20s, not just the great depression) died, a subset of the GI and Silent generations then destroyed the New Deal, both negatively (unable to deal with the oil shocks) and positively (Reagan/Thatcher/Friedman, etc..)

The people in charge now are radically incompetent at everything except internal power games. They are good at accumulating money and staying in charge and bad at everything else. They cannot fix any problems, at best they mitigate, and their mitigations (such as central banks printing money in response to the 2008 financial crisis) make underlying problems worse. On top of simple mechanical incompetence, they are also unimaginative: they cannot conceive of different ways of running society. Even when there are partial exceptions (Chinese leadership handling Covid semi-competently is an example) the elites can’t see their way to ending the ideology (capitalism, and yes, China is a capitalist mixed society) which is destroying the conditions for its own existence.

So this is where we are: the end of an ideological era; the end of a hegemonic era and a huge environmental crisis, all of which can’t be handled without fundamental ideological and leadership changes and which an reasonably be expected to kill billions of people while we “figure” or “fumble” it out.

Welcome to the fin de siecle. More than one. Enjoy the fruits of decadence while they still last.

Collapse Of Water Supply For Countries Around Tibet

On August 16, 2022

Amu-Darya Watershed

Tibet is a water tower; its glaciers, snow packs and lakes are the source of many of the greatest rivers in the countries around it. Two of those are the Indus river in India and Pakisatan, and the Amu-Darya which flows along the border of Afghanistan.

A recent study predicts:

large declines under a mid-range carbon emissions scenario by the mid-twenty-first century. Excess water-loss projections for the Amu Darya and Indus basins present a critical water resource threat, indicating declines of 119% and 79% in water-supply capacity, respectively.

Wait? Over 100%?

Anyway, this sort of thing is why I’m so negative on prospects for India and the areas which rely on the Tibetan glaciers and snow pack for water, which includes much of China, Thailand and Vietnam (the Mekong) as well. Note that this same process is occurring elsewhere: in the European alps, in the Rockies in North America, and in the rivers fed by the great northern glaciers of Canada.

What happens here will lead to denialist stupidity: the increased heat will, in some areas, lead to some years where there are is MORE water, and floods and so on, until the glaciers, in particular, collapse. So we are likely to alternate drought with floods, until the rivers just dry up, and many of the lakes with them.

When the Tibetan water tower collapses, the countries around it will be devastated. The West of North America will suffer a similar fate, though those on the coast may be able to replace much of the water with desalinization (it’s expensive, but the numbers I’ve seen indicate it’s doable, especially if you decide to stop growing almonds and other water expensive crops), but those on the wrong side of the Rockies, or high up, are pretty much out of luck. The East is in somewhat better shape, but the Great Lakes, which are close to stasis anyway, will be put under great pressure and if we try to use very much water from them we will easily drain them.

On the other side of the equation, rain patterns will shift. Hotter air means more rain, generally speaking, but where it goes is likely to change. It’s reasonable to suppose that the Sahara might get monsoons again, for example, but we just don’t know the full effects. If the monsoon fails in any region, that region will be devastated.

Add to this the massive drainage and poisoning of aquifers, including in North America, India and China and we have a situation where it is entirely reasonable to expect an absolute collapse of food production. I suspect, as I’ve discussed in other articles, that as per the “Limits to Growth” modeling, we’re about at the per capita food production peak, though not yet the absolute peak.

This stuff appears to be me to be baked in. It would require much more radical restriction of CO2 and other climate change gasses than we are doing or likely to do to stop it, and there’s some reason to believe we may be at the point where processes are now self-reinforcing, as with methane release from permafrost and swamps and the Amazon becoming a net emitter of carbon rather than a sink. As these new sources emit, they cause climate change no longer directly driven by our current actions and in doing so cause more emissions and that loop will come to drive more and more change.

That’s the situation. If we keep deaths to a billion people, that would be an extraordinarily good result, because these processes will also drive political change, including vast amounts of violence and waves of refugees which make the puny European refugee crisis look like a pygmy.

Welcome to the future. It’s here, and it’s going to get much, much worse.

So Much Plastic Chemical Contamination in Rainwater It’s Unsafe to Drink

On August 12, 2022

Sigh.

Remember when you were a kid, and it was fun to tip your head back during a rainstorm and open your mouth to drink the drops? You shouldn’t do that anymore. That’s because you’ll be ingesting too many particles of Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS), the hazardous chemicals that leach from the ultra-durable plastics we’ve created for about the past 120 years.

Earth is officially past its safe zone for plastic contamination. The PFAS “boundary has been exceeded,” according to a study published August 2 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. PFAS are known to be hazardous to both the environment and human health. At this point, these “forever chemicals” are all over the globe and have seeded the atmosphere. Most importantly, they don’t break down in the environment.

This stuff can be removed from drinking water in various ways, but that doesn’t remove it from the environment. This also implies that drinking water from most, perhaps all, freshwater sources, is no longer safe. As a child in British Columbia and the Yukon in Canada, I often drank water from snow- and glacier-driven streams and rivers, but no longer.

Health Effects:

The health effects of PFAS vary, but include reproductive, developmental, and immunological problems. Since PFAS don’t easily break down and can accumulate in the human body overtime, the more exposure a person has, the greater the chance of negative health effects. The EPA has cited evidence linking PFAS exposure to the following:

increased cholesterol levels

suppressed immune system

thyroid hormone disruption

liver and kidney damage

low infant birth weight

cancer

… PFAS can be removed from water through reverse osmosis, activated carbon filtration, and ion exchange.

Ah, joy.

This is separate from the issue of microplastics, which are now commonly found in blood and organs of humans and animals, and which some bacteria do feed on, though not enough to have a significant effect yet. (We can hope that evolution, natural or human-induced, will create more bacteria which eats plastic.)

Based on these type of studies, researchers have hypothesized that human exposure to microplastics could lead to oxidative stress, DNA damage, and inflammation — among other health problems. Particularly, when inflammation becomes chronic, this can pave the way to very serious health problems. However, it’s not only the plastic particles themselves that are potentially harmful: The microplastic surfaces in the environment are colonised by micro-organisms, some of which have been identified as human pathogens.

Human pathogens have a particularly strong bind to plastic waste, more so than to natural surfaces. Research published in 2016 identified the human pathogen Vibrio cholera, which causes cholera in humans, attached to microplastics sampled from the North and Baltic Seas.

Wonderful. I can’t find the original source, but I remember someone quipping:

“Born too late to explore the world, and too soon to roam the stars, but just in time to have microplastics in our blood.

Of course in many areas, rainwater is still too acidic to drink, so there’s that — though at least the horrible acid rain of my youth no longer plagues most of North America. We exported the industry which produces it to south-east China and various other manufacturing domiciles.

The fact of the matter is that human society is simply incapable of handling the power we’ve gained since the industrial revolution. Even when we know we’re doing massive harm, we don’t stop, or clean up, and we lie about it. In my youth, we moved from glass bottles for almost everything (including pop, as they were massively heavy) to plastic, and said “plastic can be recycled.” But most plastic isn’t recycled; only about eight percent ever has been and it’s not easy to recycle plastic because it has to be separated into different types first, since each type requires a different heat to be melted and reformed.

What’s happening, with climate, pathogens, plastic, and far more is classic “sorcerer’s apprentice” stuff: We have power we can’t control, and when we use it, we do harm.

This is why even if all the “best time ever to be alive” books and articles were right (a questionable assertion, but it is true for many people), they’re wrong in a larger sense — it’s like saying, “Man, I’m staying warm!” as you burn down your house. Once you’re finished burning your house, you’re screwed. Except what we’re burning down is the environment which keeps us healthy, fed, watered, and protected from temperatures too cold or hot to survive, as with the infamous point where it’s so hot the human body can’t cool itself.

People often point to a study published in 2010 that estimated that a wet-bulb temperature of 35 C – equal to 95 F at 100 percent humidity, or 115 F at 50 percent humidity – would be the upper limit of safety, beyond which the human body can no longer cool itself by evaporating sweat from the surface of the body to maintain a stable body core temperature…

…Our studies on young, healthy men and women show that this upper environmental limit is even lower than the theorized 35 C. It’s more like a wet-bulb temperature of 31 C (88 F). That would equal 31 C at 100 percent humidity, or 38 C (100 F) at 60 percent humidity.

This temperature has been hit over the last couple years in India.

It’s a brave new world, and our descendants, and, indeed, many people alive today are or will be cursing us — and with good reason.

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

On July 5, 2022

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.

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

On May 25, 2022

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?

Refreshing Honesty About Bank Loans & Environmental Destruction

On May 23, 2022

I actually appreciate this, from the HSBC AM Global Head of Responsible Investing, Stuart Kirk:

“At a big bank like ours, what do people think the average loan length is?” he asked. “It is six years. What happens to the planet in year seven is actually irrelevant to our loan book. For coal, what happens in year seven is actually irrelevant.”

That’s honesty. People in the financial industry are trained to follow the incentives. Their bonuses (most of their income for seniors) are based on financial results and internal power in the company. The more they make, the more they can give themselves.

To expect people whose entire careers are based on following financial incentives to not follow financial incentives is insane. While I’m generally down on incentives for control of behaviour, these are folks who are hyper-optimized for them. They don’t know any other way to operate, and if individuals were to try they would be replaced by people who do follow them.

This is why I’m a radical: I believe we need change from the roots. You can’t get a man or woman trained like Kirk to act any other way than he is acting.

Oh sure, you can try and change the incentives, and you should, but better is to create a system; a society, where financial return isn’t the most important thing. If it isn’t environmentally appropriate there should be a hard stop, an absolute ban. It should be unthinkable and anyone who does it should never be allowed to have any power ever again.

A capitalist system can’t do this. It simply cannot. It cannot “think” far enough ahead, because people are mortal, and they figure they can avoid the damage. In the run up to 2008 there was a saying on wall street, IBG, YBG—”I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.” In other words “we’ll both get the rewards and we won’t be here when the shit hits the fan.” (And if we are, well, we’ll still keep most of the money we made with this shitty fraudulent deal.)

Kirk’s a product of very close to a pure Skinner-box environment, trained to obey his conditioning till there’s little left but that conditioning. Oh, he has rationalizations, you can and should read them, but at the end of the day, he’s following the rewards.

People tend to do the right thing if they are mostly disinterested better than if you’re manipulating them with rewards and punishments. We don’t believe that, because we’re all warped. The warping started in school with grades, or perhaps with our parents and it continues till many of us know no other way of living.

But if we continue like this, we’ll burn the planet down. Oh, humanity will probably survive, but at the end, we’ll have genocided half the species on earth and reduced Earth’s carrying capacity massively. There’ll be less good agricultural land, few rivers with less water, most aquifers will be drained and poisoned, and large parts of the world where humans live now will be effectively uninhabitable for months every year.

That’s insanity, but it happens after six years and hey, if you’ve made enough money, you figure you and your kids will be able to live in one of the remaining good places.