Ian Welsh

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

Category: Environment Page 5 of 15

The Petrochemical Age In Context

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On April 19, 2022

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If you want to do super big picture macrohistory, humans have really had three eras:

1) Hunting/gathering

2) Agriculture

3) Industrial.

To over-summarize, hunter-gatherers, with some exceptions in nutritionally dense areas were generally egalitarian. They had high childhood mortality and a fair bit of violence, but they lived longer lives than any time period before the Industrial era, and were health. In some cases we still haven’t caught up (for example, the width of hips of their women was wider than ours, and that correlates to health and easier childbith.)

Agriculture started out OK-ish for about 2,000 years, but the nature of agriculture creates private surpluses and allows for large elites. It’s easy to appropriate food and service from farmers, because they can’t move away and they can’t hide their take well (crops are harvested at known times, and about how much land produces is also known.) For the vast majority of the population, living in an agricultural civilization sucked. Yes, there were more of us, but we were sicker, died younger and more likely to have a nasty overlord. Violence decreased (though these figures are controversial), but that’s because the lords and masters don’t want other people killing.

Humans in this period were essentially domesticated, and there’s some reason to believe the process weeded out most people who naturally rebel against control. This is little different from how wolves became dogs, and just as degrading.

We know the industrial era, because we live in it, but I want to invite you take the long view: imagine it’s a 1,000 years from now. Or 5,000.

What the industrial age looks like when you zoom out is “the petrochemical age”. We figured out how to harness coal, gas and oil, added in a few other sources of energy, and became clever at hooking machines up to our power sources.

The problem is that in a period of less than 300 years we’ve burned up so many petrochems that we’re overheating the planet thru the mechanism of climate changes gases, and our population is well over the planet’s carrying capacity, leading to a crush in ecosystem diversity and the absolute number of animals, plants and insects.

Since ecosystems + climate are what make the planet habitable for humans, from the long point of view, all the industrial/petrochem era looks like is a massive orgy: a predator species which has overshot the world’s carrying capacity.

If we can’t transition to a technological way of supporting ourselves which doesn’t destroy the world’s carrying capacity, then all this period will be looked back on as is a blip: a brief period of species-wide stupidity, where we exploited technologies and powers we were too foolish and stupid to control the consequences of.

Progress isn’t automatic, and it isn’t one way. When you look at charts of health characteristics in the western world from the stone age, on, one culture stands out: Greek City States. They live longer than anyone else, they are healthier on multiple metrics, and their civilization is destroyed by the Romans, who don’t have nearly as good lives.

The same thing can happen to us. We are not sustainably transitioning to a new way of living. Even when we do some right things like electrification, we don’t build items to endure. We’re dumping valuable minerals into phones and cars and consumer goods we’ll throw out in 5 years or so, and we don’t have the resources to waste. We’ve done nothing to stop climate change. We’re over-fishing. Over 90% of the insects in multiple areas (perhaps world wide) are gone, as anyone over 50 or so can tell you. The birds are gone, too. The big animals. The wild areas. The coral reefs are dying. The Amazon is dying and now a net-emitter of carbon, not a sink.

In theory we could probably still fix this. The technology either exists or is with in sprint to do so, but it’s about more than technology: we’d have to change how we live. Give up our consumption based society; get rid of planned obsolesence and use the same items for decades. Ditch exurbs and suburbs almost entirely, and re-wild or make it so that people who want land have to live by the rule that their presence must increase biodiversity.

The changes are radical, and there is no sign of anyone in power taking them seriously. Instead we build more and more crap, pollute more and more, spew more and more gases into the atmosphere, and salivate over drilling for gas and oil in the arctic, even as we run down or pollute our aquifers.

Our technology was a test: we were given (or gave ourselves) great power, and our task was to use it to benefit ourselves in a way which was beneficial, or at least not catastrophic, for the rest of life on Earth (our ecosystem) and to not destroy a climate which is the only one human civilization has ever known.

We failed in this task, and so the Petrochemical Age is likely to just look like a blip. Perhaps a new technological civilization will arise from our ashes: but if it is to survive and prosper it will  have to do what we didn’t and give at least as much back to nature as it takes out (and rather more, to fix the damage.)

As for us, it seems unlikely most of our civilization will make it. Doubtless hi-tech enclaves will continue to exist, but ecosystem collapse, water shortages and climate change make it unlikely our civilization as a whole will survive another century. It may not even make it 50 years.

And looked at from afar, it’ll be a 4 century mistake, in which some people lived very well, but the near permanent ability of Earth to support life was damaged, making every future human poorer in a very real sense.

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That Poisoned Land

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On November 30, 2021

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Mary Stewart was a best-selling author for much of the 20th century. I first stumbled across her as a child, reading the “The Hollow Hills” and the “Crystal Cave,” two of her books about Merlin, but most of what she wrote were adventurous romances, often described as “Nancy Drew for adults.” Recently I read her book “Airs Above The Ground,” written in 1965. She was a master at landscape description, and I felt this scene of a meadow in the Alps was worth sharing:

The grass was thick with familiar meadow flowers – harebells, thyme, eyebright, and, where the scythe had not yet passed, the foaming white and yellow of parley and buttercups. What was not so familiar was the fluttering, rustling life of the meadow: the whole surface of the field seemed moving with butterflies – meadow browns, blues, sulphurs, fritillaries, and a few of my own Vanessas, the red admirals and tortoiseshells. Their colours flickered among the flowers, each vanishing momentarily as it clung and folded, then opening to its own bright colour as it fluttered on. Even the green roots of the grass were alive, as countless grasshoppers hopped and fiddled there. The air droned with bees, all zooming past me, I noticed, on the same purposeful track, as if on some apian Autobahn of their own. They were all making for a little hut, the size of a small summer-house, chalet-style and beautifully built of pine, and as full of tiny windows as a dovecot. It was, in fact, a bee-house, a sort of collective hive for several swarms, each one with its own tiny bee-door, behind which it made its honey in candle-shaped combs. Amused and interested, I watched the laden bees aiming like bullets, each for its own door, remembering how, even a few years ago, in my own childhood, the English meadows, too, had been alive with wings, and how quiet now was the poisioned countryside. .

I think it would be hard for most moderns to write such a passage, even if they had Stewart’s eye and skill; we’re almost all from the city, and we just don’t know birds and the flowers and the insects the way her generation did.

But, of course, it’s that last line that caught my eye -— such a beautiful paragraph, ends with “the poisoned countryside.”

And it has become worse. Many have noted that “bug splat,” where driving through the countryside would leave windshields absolutely plastered with dead insects, is a thing of the past.

It’s harder and harder to remember just how alive the world once was, with plants, insects, birds and animals. We can only wonder at, say, stories of the old Grand Banks off the east coast of Canada, where you had only to dip a bucket into the water and it would come up with fish. In my childhood, almost any beach in British Columbia had enough clams for a meal, but now they’re gone. Vietnamese immigrants took too many to sell commercially, and destroyed the beds.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

The long, lost passenger pigeons used to fly in flocks so large they genuinely did blot out the sun, and it was unimaginable to early settlers that one day they would be no more; and many are the accounts of how the Bison flocked in their millions, filling the prairies to the horizon. The prairies themselves were entirely different from what we now know; they had a covering which protected the soil which Europeans removed so they could farm, and thus the soil blew away and lost its fertility.

As a child in the 30s, my (honorary) Uncle Jack would take a hook and line, walk ten minutes out of town on the British Columbia coast, and have a fresh salmon in ten minutes.

All of this we have denuded, poisoned, destroyed. In exchange, we have food that has less nutrients every generation, that you can eat and still feel hungry, and we have a lot of sugar, corn-syrup, salt, and foods made to purposely addict us, so various folks could be rich.

I remember a fantasy book where the hero had traveled to another world at the end of WWII, then returned around 1970, and his description of eating some beef, “it tasted like something had been removed, and something had been added.”

In so many ways, we live in a marvelous cornucopia. I can go to the supermarket and buy a wild variety of food, unavailable to prior generations, but it is a hollow bounty, built on destruction, a heating of the house, by burning it down.

We might as well enjoy it, but the price is being paid already and will be paid even more in the future. We have traded a world that was alive and bounteous, for an artificial cornucopia, and for many of us, that cornucopia will come to an end before we die.

Methane And The Point Where Humans Are No Longer In Control

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On October 4, 2021

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I’ve been talking about methane release from the permafrost (and perhaps arctic) for a long time now. Back in 2013 I wrote:

Various processes are past the point of no return; we are going to see huge methane releases from Russia, for example. We are going to have worse global warming than the worst mainstream predictions.

Climate change will continue to present itself as more and worse extreme weather events, like the nasty hurricanes we’ve been seeing hitting further and further north. We are going to also see changes in rainfall patterns; these will continue to devastate agriculture.

Back in 2013, in theory we could have stopped this, but in practice we weren’t going to because none of the major governments then or now was going to do what it took. In fact, Barack Obama was busy increasing oil production, much of it thru fracking, as fast as he could, as deliberate policy.

“I know we’re in oil country and we need American energy.”

“You wouldn’t always know it ,but it went up every year I was president,” he said to applause. “That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas that was me, people.”

Obama: “Suddenly America is the largest oil producer, that was me people … say thank you.”

The irony here is that he said this just after saying how proud he was of the Paris climate accords, which while they had “targets” had no enforcement mechanism and which EVERYONE with any sense had to know were a dead letter, even if they had been adequate, which they weren’t.

Back to the methane. Every time I talked about this people would tell me I was full of shit, the science didn’t support it, etc… I know it’s considered in bad taste to mention this, but they were wrong, and I was right:

Now, here’s the important thing. Humans have driven climate change BUT there is a point at which we will no longer be doing so. While the number includes underwater methane as well, there is effectively more carbon in permafrost than in the atmosphere.

The more methane and carbon released, the higher temperatures in the arctic are and thus the more carbon and methane is released.

At that point (and it’s not the only feedback cycle, the Amazon is now releasing carbon, not sinking it) humans are no longer in primary control of climate change: the upward spiral takes over. There will be a new equilibrium point, but we don’t know what it is. We can guess, from previous geological eras, but none of that news is good news.

Will humanity survive? Probably. Will civilization as we know it survive? No. We may have an advanced technological society at the other end, but it will look a lot of different from what we have today, and there are good odds of a long decline with most people dropping out of hi-tech society. At the least we can expect mass migrations of literally billions of people, and (while it’s a guess) a drop in world population by half to 80% or so. Extreme climate change will drop the carrying capacity of our world significantly.

The last real chance to mitigate this passed when American and British elites colluded to destroy any chance of either Bernie Sanders of Jeremy Corbyn running America or Britain. By the time we have another shot at non psychopathic leaders (yes, Biden is a psychopath, based on his actions over his lifetime and so is Johnson) it will literally be too late.

But then, it was too late back in 2013, really, because the politics are what they are. It’s hard to overstate just how hard elites came out against Sanders (every candidate dropping out at the same time, except Biden/Sanders) or Corbyn (lying about him over 80% of the time and smearing him as anti-semite when he’s been an anti-racism campaigner all his life and would be the first to die to stop a new Holocaust.)

Our elites are, functionally, psychopaths. They aren’t, mostly, stupid (though some are deficient, like Bush Jr. and Biden (senile) and Johnson), but many are quite smart (Clinton and Obama were both borderline geniuses.) They just don’t care. They don’t believe that they will personally be effected by severe climate change (remember, they’re OLD) and to the extent they care about their children, they figure money and power will obtain protection. As for you and your children, you matter not at all. You are sheep, to be shorn while your continued living is beneficial to them, and culled when you no longer produce.

Meanwhile, permafrost methane release is real, it’s happening NOW not it in 2090, and it’s going to get worse.

The mainstream consensus forecasts for climate change were all wrong, and all wrong on the optimistic side.

I have been writing about this over and over again, not because I expect to change public policy, I don’t. I am writing about it so that those who read me know what is happening with sufficient warning to take steps to protect themselves and others they care about, to whatever extent they can. For many, who have few resources, there may be little they can do, but almost everyone can do something.

Winter isn’t coming. Summer is. And we are not going to like it.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Humanity’s Completely Broken Feedback Systems

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On August 10, 2021

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If you want to understand how we got where we are, it’s simple: our strongest feedback systems to our decision making people are telling them “everything’s great, stay on course!”

For over 40 years now the rich have gotten richer. Politicians have gotten richer. Corporate officers, CEOs and executives have gotten richer.

Money is reward, and the reward centers for our elites are going off like a slot machine that constantly pays millions. BLING! BLING! BLING!

Whenever someone says “you should do less of this thing that makes you more money and power”, which is essentially everything that needs to be changed from Covid (making them richer) to climate change (still more oil to pump, baby) to ending pharma patents (Bill Gates says NO) to fixing inequality or feeding hungry people or housing the homeless, well, their fortunes (or bribes) come from making these things worse.

Capitalism is supposed to provide a feedback system. It isn’t the best feedback system, but if forced or allowed to work (and only government can enforce it, which is why rich people can’t be allowed, as they always purchase the government) it makes individuals and corporations who can’t even make a real profit go bankrupt.

But in 2008, Bernanke, whose entire intellectual opus was “how do we make sure another FDR doesn’t happen by making sure the rich never lose their money and power again” started the process of shoveling money down the gullets of the rich. (Greenspan had been piping it in too, but maintained some pretense he wasn’t and tried not to actually print money obviously.)

Every major central bank in the world followed course and all the economic feedback systems broke. No matter what rich idiots did, they would never as a class be allowed to go bankrupt, or even not keep getting richer. Vast money funneled to the rich and inflation showed up exactly where one would expect it, in things the rich were bidding up (yachts, art, luxury apartments) and in whatever they were buying up to get a new revenue stream (housing, most recently, so rent will soon /really/ go thru the roof.)

Now, as I pointed out at the time, the problem with all of this is that the real world exists, and so does a real economy in which items must be manufactured, food grown and products delivered. All of that has to be done in a world with weather, climate, animals, plants and an atmosphere.

Since all the feedback systems put in place by humans had broken (no one in power cared or cares about UN climate reports), we then had to wait for the world to start smacking us around.

That has started, with wildfires and northern hurricanes and so on (and Covid, to some extent), and the logistics system has proven itself to be fragile and easily disrupted exactly as many of us pointed out, while power and water systems and so on show their fragility as well.

But it’s not enough yet, this is all stuff the rich can ignore: have more than one home, have them off the grid, travel by private jet, etc, etc…

So the feedback will continue until it becomes so severe either the Proles do a Versailles on unresponsive elites or the elites feel more endangered than their bank accounts can make up for. (A hundred million+ dollars can buy a LOT of immunity. You may be dead before they feel it.)

This story isn’t new to regular readers, though, but I want to splice it with another thread.

Incentives.

I hate incentives. Loathe them. Every place I ever worked, the incentives did more harm than good. But it’s the mantra, the mindless ideology of our age that incentives work and you should align incentives.

Since we re-engineered our entire society to appear to do that, our societies have gone to shit for everyone but the one to three percent or so, but since feedback to anybody but them doesn’t matter, we continue.

I recently read John Ralston Saul’s “The Unconscious Civilization.” Or, rather, re-read it, but last time I looked at it was in the nineties.

Saul wrote a bunch of non-fiction books and they’re all bad except “The Unconscious Civilization”, which is brilliant. (They’re bad because Saul is of the old humanist tradition that insists on putting in as many references to the greats of the past as possible.)

But Unconscious Civilization is the publication of a series of five lectures by Saul and the limited time forced him to get to the fucking point. So, read it. (It’s scarily right about almost everything.)

One point Saul makes over and over again is the “value of disinterest”. Social decisions cannot be made properly by people who have an interest in them. Cannot be. We have run a 40 year (arguably 200 to 500 year) experiment on this, and it has failed and failed and failed. Elites need moderate negative feedback and to be insulated from the effects of their decisions which benefit groups.

Our society, as Saul points out, is all organized into interest groups, which half the audience is probably thinking is insane, because they think of interests group as things like environmentalist and people who want food aid, and not as corporations. (Though NGOs are definitely corporatist by Saul’s definition.)

People who have a strong interest can’t make good decisions for anyone but themselves about anything they have a strong positive interest in. It’s that simple.

If we want out of this mess, we have to break strong positive incentives. No stock options, for example. No surgeons flying around in private jets.

When someone’s interest is so strong it makes sense for them to burn the world down (and be clear, it did, because most wouldn’t still be here, and many figure their wealth will protect them), interest has failed. Incentives have failed.

Elites must be subject to the effects of their decisions, yes, but primarily on the downside.

It’s hard to see a way out of this now, because there isn’t one.

Instead the way out will be forced. When fear rises to the necessary level, those who betray society as a whole for their own interest will be dealt with. If they’re lucky it will be thru democratic norms, if they aren’t lucky, it will be the justice of the mob. In either case it will be too late to stop the worst of climate change and ecological collapse.

For you, a reader, the point is to internalize what went wrong and why, so you understand the conditions in which it will change and do not waste time on actions which won’t help. Moral ‘suasion will not work. The elites will respond to power and fear and nothing else.

If you can’t apply enough of that, or any movement asking for your help indicates their strategy doesn’t involve power and fear, then you need to prepare in other ways. In fact, as an ordinary person, you just need to prepare, because while you can do  your bit you do not have enough power to be determinative.

Politics is unlikely to save you and what you do will not determine if it does. So you must, with others, save yourselves.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

How The Metaphysics Of Capitalism Destroyed The World

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On July 22, 2021

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Back in 1968 the book “Limits to Growth” stormed the world. Computer models predicted that humans would run out of almost every resource, overshoot carying capacity, then crash.

It was well known and widely discussed and combined with the oil crashes, made the 70s a ferment of practical and theoretical work on alternative energy, different ways of farming and so on.

Almost all of that came to an end in the 80s, with Reagan. Carter had put solar panels on the White House, Reagan had them torn down. A decision was made to crush wages and thus the oil consumption of ordinary people, while bringing new sources online as fast as possible. Obama, with fracking, made the same decision, by the way, but even more successfully, turning the US back into a HUGE producer of oil.

But what’s important today isn’t all of that, which I’ve discussed at tedious length in the past.

Instead I want to discuss the basic argument against the “Limits To Growth”.

“We will substitute away.”

In other words, alternate energy will step up and we’ll move away from oil and coil. We’ll find substitutes for steel and nickel and rare earths and anything else in short supply.

BUT what matters is the metaphysics of the argument. When the people making this argument said it would happen, they assumed “the market” would do it.

Which, it sort of has, but too late. Much too late.

There was a strong assumption that prices were information which stored in them all known information about the past and the future, and that therefore prices would drive self-interested people to make the necessary substitutions or find new sources.

To market disciples, the market’s “free hand” was like God, all-knowing and all-powerful and weirdly benevolent. All we had to do was let the market run and it would solve all our problems.

So why didn’t that happen?

Well, to start, the market doesn’t price the future well at all. Never has, and never will. People making decisions in 1970 will mostly be dead before all this stuff matters, and the same is true of people making decisions in the 2010s. Even if they aren’t dead, is there anything in human history which makes us believe humans are good at making very long term plans, over decades to generations?

Why would you believe the market would do it based on a discipline which suggests humans are rational and know what is good for them and act rationally to get what is good for them? (If you believe all of that, you are more of a fantasist than some fanatic whipping himself while screaming for God to save him.)

Now I’m not concerned here with the hypocrites: the people who knew this was all bunk but expected to get rich off it (they were, in a real sense, very rational. A bad future they don’t see or don’t care about, “I get 50 good years and die rich when the bad times come, whatever” isn’t a reason not be rich now, if you don’t care about future people.)

But many many people really believed this bunk and the issue is that by believing that the “market” and “price signals” and *vague hand waving* would solve the problem: by saying “we have a system that solves these problems automatically by giving correct feedback” they made it impossible to solve to the extent that they were believed. (And remember, huge amounts of money were run on the markets for decades based on these ideas. People believed and put their cash on the line.)

In fact, of course, we could have taken the warning of “Limits To Growth”, “Peak Oil” and “Global Warming” and used them to make changes.

Ironically a lot of those changes would be exactly what the disciples of hand-wavy “market” crap suggested would happen automatically.

Use markets and public policy: massively subsidize alternative energy and research so that where we are with solar today is where we would have been in the 90s. Massively research alternatives to bottleneck resources. Stop over-fishing, by force if necessary. And, of course, put sharp limits on “planned obsolence” backed with death sentences for executives.

If you’d rather get more resources or if you want more than one strategy, massively fund space exploration with an eye to mining rather than defund NASA in waves (Obama, classically, did the worst cuts to NASA ever so that private industry/billionaires could make money, but NASA funding should have been increased in the 70s.)

Warnings only serve those who heed them and when you believe in metaphysical entities which don’t have the attributes they think they do (God, Markets), then you don’t act to save yourself. Markets were never, by themselves, going to miraculously do what needed being done in time. Oh sure, price feedback has eventually gotten us some decent solar, and so on, but decades later than we needed it.

Markets are human creations, like God, and to work correctly they have to be tuned for the problem at hand or, even (heresy) one has to consider that there are things that Markets or Gods can’t do, or are bad at, and find other solutions.

So here we are, and markets have not made everything good and the world’s forests are burning and we’re about to have another oil boom, as best I can tell.

Like God, mis-using markets or assigning them powers they don’t have, leads to terrible consequences, so get ready for the invisible hand to slap us silly.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Hot Enough to Die

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On July 9, 2021

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So, the temperatures in the Pacific Northwest probably cooked around a billion sea animals.

Dead.

A billion.

The town of Lytton, which reached Canada’s hottest ever temperature, later burned down: 90 percent of the buildings gone. (Back in the 80s, I drove through Lytton a few times, can’t say I know it, but I spent a lot of time in the country around it.)

We’ve already hit high enough temperatures to kill some animals outright.

Humans can get there as well: It’s known as the wet bulb temperature.

The wet-bulb temperature (WBT) is the temperature read by a thermometer covered in water-soaked cloth (wet-bulb thermometer) over which air is passed.

This is to see what temperature it is with evaporation. If the wet bulb temperature hits 35 celcius, humans can’t lose heat, even if they drink water, and will die.

This corresponds to 95 percent humidity, and 88 F (31.1 Celcius.) The lower the humidity, the more heat you can take before dying, a.k.a., “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.”

These are ideals, though, a lot of people die at lower wet-bulb temperatures, because they aren’t perfectly healthy or the heat just keeps going and going.

A researcher noted that just how bad high wet-bulb is:

“Even if they’re in perfect health, even if they’re sitting in the shade, even if they’re wearing clothes that make it easy in principle to sweat, even if they have an endless supply of water,” Horton said. “If there’s enough moisture in the air, it’s thermodynamically impossible to prevent the body from overheating.” 

Coming to somewhere near you?

Most of these wet bulb conditions were concentrated in South Asia, the coastal Middle East, and southwest North America… A growing number of other regions are nearing this point: The Southeast US, the Gulf of Mexico and Northern Australia, all denoted by green on the map, are seeing higher daily maximum wet bulb temperatures. 

Obviously air conditioning can protect you, but what if your AC goes out, or worse, there’s a brown or black out? A few hours later, you’re dead. Willing to bet your life on over-stressed power grids?

And, while a little misleading (they aren’t here in any great numbers, yet…), this is normal:

Originally, conditions like this weren’t expected until the mid 21st century, according to climate models. But they are actually already here.

Fun stuff, but what makes it even more difficult is climate instability; after all, much of the Pacific Northwest, especially along the coast, was known for its mild temperatures. (I grew up there, and can attest.)

The core thing to understand is less about heat specifically, and more that climate will keep getting more dangerous, and that you can’t count on government or corporations to keep you safe. You shouldn’t, if you can avoid it, put your life at risk by assuming “the power grid won’t go out when I need it most” or “there’ll always be a continuous supply of food.”

Expect that the highly-taut, over-efficient, no-slack, and unmaintained systems that run our society. optimized for maximum profit and not for resilience, will fail under shocks they were never designed to withstand — especially as our elites now expect such shocks, like Covid, to make them even richer and more powerful.

You aren’t precisely on your own, but don’t count on the normal of the past few decades to predict the future — except the normal of “no one with any power actually cares if you live or die or suffer, if they can make some money from your suffering.”

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

 

 

 

 

 

Siphon the System Thinking Doesn’t Work Against Nature

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On July 5, 2021

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We live in a very, very rich society.

Oh, many people are poor, and real poverty, whether in the “Global South” or first-world backwaters, but our society throws off vast wealth. We could, essentially trivially, feed, house, and clothe everyone and give them a decent life. We have that sort of surplus, and far, far more.

In healthy societies, or societies where elites are scared of outside forces (whether human or natural), the emphasis is on growing the pie, on making the society stronger and richer so that it can survive the forces of which the elites and the population (perhaps) are wary. Unproductive use of resources is frowned on, something you can find even in English common law, where if land or property wasn’t being used, after a time it could be taken by someone who would use it productively.

In fantastically wealthy ages, where elites are sure they are secure from all enemies, they concentrate on fighting over the wealth, or, the pie.

The Gilded Age is a good example. The Americans and Brits of the early to mid 1800s were concerned with growing the pie; they didn’t feel invincible or untouchable. But after Britain had secured its second Empire, and painted more of the map than any other nation in history, and after the US had its civil war, broke the natives, and crushed the Spanish and Mexicans, the US and Britain felt they had it made. There were no real threats left.

So, the countries turned inside. They concentrated on taking from others, on amassing wealth. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil empire was created by by buying out (often at terrible prices) the existing oil industry. It wasn’t creation of something new; it was consolidation in one man’s hands, of what was already there, so that he could reap the benefits.

England’s middle class in 1850 was the envy of the world. By World War I, the average Englishman had been so impoverished that huge swathes of potential soldiers had to be turned away from service in the armed forces. The rich imtiserated the middle class, crushed the farmers as best they could, and fought amongst each other to see who would rule the roost. (In this, they were less collegial than our rich are — far more willing to throw former members of the elite out entirely.)

To put it simply, there was far more money and power to be gained by grabbing a bigger slice of the pie than by growing it.

In the US, this wasn’t fatal; there was a lot of stolen land, and there was still plenty of room for elites to grow new things, even if it wasn’t the emphasis.

In Britain, it led to a fatal decline which is still ongoing; we can see now that Britain probably won’t even stay the “United Kingdom” —- odds are good Scotland will leave, and to add insult to injury, they’ll lose Northern Ireland as well. It is even possible, in the next 40 years or so, that Wales might leave.

From the behemoth astride the world, to a pathetic country that can’t even keep its heartland together.

For our purposes, however, the point is simpler: If you want to rule over other people, you must, in the words of Lois McMaster Bujold, rule their imagination. The greatest of men and women could lose everything tomorrow if their subjects simply stopped believing in their subjugation — and who has how much is entirely a matter of convincing other people to give it to you and let you keep it. Even when it’s a matter of force, you must convince the enforcing class to do what you say and to point the guns and use the prisons on the “right’ people.

It is true that growing the pie requires a fair bit of ruling over other people’s imaginations, but real increases in societal wealth require actually dealing with the world as it is; conquering people who resist, inventing and building steam engines, figuring out how to grow more food on the same land, and so on.

Just getting people to give you more of what already exists, what was created by other people and is produced by a system created by humans of the past, however, is pure imagination work. If people believe it is true, it is. You’re only dealing with human psychology and mass psychology.

Of course, a real world still exists; sometimes its people who don’t buy into your story. This is why China and the US are going to cold war and maybe real war, because neither is willing to live in the world created by the others fictions and ideals.

Then there is nature. It doesn’t matter if you believe that carbon and methane heat up the planet. They do and they will. It doesn’t matter what you think about Covid, if you un-mask and don’t quarantine people who have it, or came in contact with those who do, and if you don’t contact trace, and so on and so forth, then it will act like any other pandemic disease and keep mutating and spreading.

You can’t just manipulate other people’s beliefs about Covid and expect it to go away.

And so, people who have spent their entire lives doing nothing but manipulating other people’s beliefs are incapable of dealing with Covid or climate change. Covid doesn’t “listen to them.” Covid doesn’t care what they say.

Same with climate change. The forest will burn, regardless of what you say to the trees or to the weather.

Our elites, trained only to manipulate other people, are incapable of dealing with real-world events that can’t be controlled simply by controlling other people’s beliefs.

And so we will burn, and cough, and Covid will become endemic as the world slides towards collapse.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Reminder: Prepare for the Forest Fire/Smoke Season

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On June 29, 2021

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These temperatures from the West coast of Canada last weekend were absolutely insane.

I grew up in Western BC, Vancouver, and Victoria, in the ’70s and ’80s. These temperatures are crazy. Victoria, in particular (bottom right) is (or was) noted for mild temperatures. Hardly anyone has air conditioners. My parents retired there, and I visited regularly right up to about 2010. It was retirement paradise.

Anyway, if you live in the west of Canada or the US (and the West now extends far past the coast, almost to the mid line, in many cases), please be sure to buy a respirator mask (with extra filters) and an indoor air purifier, and do it NOW. The fire season is likely to hit early and hard this year, and after the rush you won’t be able to find any anywhere.

Make other preparations, including getting ready to leave, as necessary. If you are asthmatic, see about stocking up on meds, and so on. Don’t leave this, please. I know I’ve written this before, recently, and it’s a bit boring to write it again, but I want to be sure people hear this.

As for the West, I am in mourning. I love the coast; the rain forests dripping with water, the ferns looking like jewels in the dew, the deep, dark forests where decaying leaves soften each step and old trees shelter you as you walk. Much of that is going to go away. Future generations along most of the West coast will never know the beauty and ease of the temperate rain forest.

For this and many other crimes, those who chose to do nothing about climate change are guilty. We are losing so much, and will lose so much more, that should never have been placed at risk.

Some of what will go is no loss, mostly human things. But the animals and plants did nothing to deserve this, and my sorrow is even more for them than the humans who will suffer.

Only fools ask for what they deserve, but ask or not, we are going to get it. It’s just a pity that so many of the most responsible won the death bet, and so many of those who will suffer did nothing to warrant it.

Meanwhile… get prepared for fire season, so your suffering is reduced and less is added to the toll, at least these years.

Update: Barely ahead of it, wildfires have started in BC. Get the gear you need tomorrow, Wednesday. Don’t wait.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

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