Much of Western America Will Be Uninhabitable in 40 Years

Ian,

Now that you mention Ronald Reagan and “Morning in America” do you think the 1970s were perhaps our last chance at stopping all of this environmental damage? It seems to me that the environmental movement reached its peak in the 1970s and then declined dramatically once Reagan became president. In the 1970s you had both Democrats and Republicans supporting environmental measures. Think of the positions of Edmund Muskie and Richard Nixon, for example. The EPA was signed into existence under Nixon.

Today the environment doesn’t seem to be much of a priority for most Democrats and Republicans are now rabidly anti-environment to the point where most of them refuse to even consider any evidence that we are damaging the planet. On top of that I think we are in a new era of techno-utopianism where many people think that technology will save us and that we can trash the planet and just move to Mars. I think this is wishful thinking and not very realistic. I used to be a techno-optimist but now I think this stuff about space colonization is just fantasy that lets people kick the can down the road when it comes to destroying the Earth.

Speaking of contaminated groundwater –

https://www.ecowatch.com/generational-harm-of-pesticides-2596453994.html

Ok, well. I just posted this in response to Linda Amick on the last thread. But it seems more pertinent than ever here, because as already been mentioned, were not getting out of this unscathed — it’s now about how bad the scathing will be, and whether we learn from it or not.

Linda Amick said, “We need a new mythology in the West.” To which I replied:

The one hope I hold to in the face of climate change is that the impact will force humanity to complete it’s third ethical evolution — what Aldo Leopold called the development of a “Land Ethic.”

The impacts could be so great as to create the new mythology you speak of. Indeed, it would seem the only thing that could create a new mythology capable of serving as the foundation for a land ethic.

More on Leopold’s Land Ethic here: https://www.aldoleopold.org/post/understanding-land-ethic/
One of America’s greatest thinkers in my humble opinion.

Hyman G. Rickover called it “oxcart thinking.” The kind of military thinking that would, he said, result in the most heavily armored and armed oxcarts imaginable, capable of doing nothing more than killing the oxen that were pulling them.

We are designing ways of delivering trivial amounts of “renewable energy,” and building millions of cars annually that get marginally better mileage from each gallon of fossil fuel. We should be finding fundamentally different ways to structure our society in order to use orders of magnitude less energy for everything we do.

Do we really needs 20 different brands of corn flakes in 10 different size boxes, sold in fifty different stores in every town, with every family making five trips to those stores four times a week to bring those corn flakes to the table?

This is completely off-topic but, as I notice the recurring hoopla over presidential sex scandals, I am astounded that our misleaders don’t see that their hypocrisy is so extreme as to be visible from outer space. People, if you continue to sanctify the Kennedys, you forfeit the right to complain about sexual improprieties forever.

The Duke study states ” the overall extraction of water for fracking is negligible when compared with other industrial water use” We have huge underground lakes of saline water in the SW ideal for fracking and not much else.

This is the sort of insanity which is routine today: burning seed corn to heat the house. We know what we’re doing is insanely short-sighted. We know it will come back to burn us badly later on. We do it anyway because it makes money in the short term.

This is why I’ve turned anti-capitalist. One of the most striking things about capitalism is how it gets even smart people to do things that they fully admit are foolish, short-sighted and destructive. I am pretty sure that many if not most CEOs would say “yes, we need to invest in more private and public infrastructure”, “yes, we need to take urgent action against climate change”, “yes, we’re frittering away our antibiotics for short-term profit”, and even some will at least pay lip service to “yes, growing inequality is a problem” but, when it’s time for the next quarterly report, all the good capitalist lemmings go running off the cliff together. This is because, starting in the 1970s, the kind of blended capitalism we had became more ‘pure capitalism’–capitalism is the direction and control of the economy by those who have capital (money) to invest, and Milton Friedman’s adage of ‘stockholder value trumps everything’ essentially turned the de facto decision-making over to the investor class.

What’s ironic about this is that many of these types (more openly or not) are fans of Ayn Rand, who constructed stick-figure tales of the heroic “individualist” struggling against the unthinking, greedy, short-sighted, stupid “herd”–a “herd” who often appealed to the guv’mint for intervention—yet there is not better fit for her portrayal of the stupid “herd” than the capitalist investor class, who’ve made getting freebies and bailouts from the ‘guv’mint’ a fine art.

This would be the most just desserts ever served, but for the fact that the rest of the world will not escape the same fate. America was never going to switch over to renewables because the “American way of life is non-negotiable” as our former Dr. Evil veep once put it, and going to renewables would have still required that Americans forfeit quite a few of the luxuries they refuse to live without.

If you really want to be anti-capitalist, then you must be anti-automobile. The automobile is corporate capitalism most important commodity. Every automobile that has ever been built has put out about 44 tons of Co2 into the atmosphere during its lifetime. Traffic violence kills about 1.25 million people around the planet every year, mostly people in the third word. It’s the great taboo to speak truth about our diseased, addictive preoccupation with the automobile. No one wants to listen to anyone bad-mouthing something that they love.

If Murphy’s Law holds true, we will defeat the problem of anthropogenic global warming–only to learn that AGW was the only thing holding back the next Ice Age. 😛

Alan Coovert:

If you really want to be anti-capitalist, then you must be anti-automobile.

I’m against our car culture, for sure (going to Taiwan opens one’s eyes to the beauty of a really well- done mass transit culture), but making cars or any other item isn’t necessarily ‘capitalist’. We made cars before we turned uber-capitalist, and the Swedes and Soviets and others made cars too.

Capitalism isn’t about making stuff and marginally is about selling stuff (consumerism). Capitalism as I define it is the direction and control of an economy by the investor class, by those who can put up money. These are given de facto the rights to tell how organizations who actually *do* make things what should and shouldn’t be made, and how it should or should not be made. And nearly always this class is utterly clueless about the technical merits or failure modes of their decisions and willfully blind to the long-term consequences. They are numbers-in-an-excel spreadsheet idiots, whose vision is no farther than the next quarterly profit report.

If you just happen to be a leader of such an organization making things who has real insight and vision and a view of the long-term consequences, well, then you probably won’t last. The stockholders will stage a coup against you, and/or your stock will fall and you’ll be bought out (and fired). Everything you do must be done with an eye on the stock price. This is why Henry Ford–admittedly a very problematic person–ended up crashing his own stock in the 1920s so his family could buy a controlling share, because “I can’t make cars with a bunch of idiots who know nothing about making cars looking over my shoulder and second-guessing my every move”.

Increasingly, capitalism isn’t about making stuff at all. It’s about “enclosures” and figuring out ways to charge people for things once free, and not adding any real value at all. Our economy becoming more “pure” capitalist in the past 40 years is also why wages have nosedived, because if you sell money for a living, then the poorer most people become, the more customers (i.e., borrowers) you will have. Passing out the credit cards was a way to maintain consumer spending in the face of declining wages. Now selling things like reverse mortgages and insurance policies on things breaking in your home is a way to address declining savings (a logical consequence of declining real wages).

The profits from all this in turn go into things like stock buybacks and company purchases and other paper transfers that once again do not add anything of value to the real economy. And while I fully concur with you that for environmental and overall human well-being our car culture is a disaster, and that mass transit is much preferable for a whole host of reasons, at least they’re real things. Capitalists, who live in a world of paper, think their paper manipulations are more ‘real’ and valuable than cars.

(And FWIW–while I live in fairly rural Appalachia, the company I work for used to run a bus service to come pick workers up to take them to and from work. So yes, even here, mass transit is possible if there is political will to implement it).

Oil companies would simply get to work at influencing mindless minions to embrace the coming ice age, so they could sell more product.

@scruff,

I remember the predictions of coming Frosty Chill Age being made in the 1970s, based on running the cycles-as-best-known from the past into the future. Just lately those predictions are made the basis of mockery for climatology today. Look how wrong the “Frosty Chillists” were! Ha! Ha! Ha! Does anyone think the Warmists are any more right today? Ha! Ha! Ha!

What I think happened is that the Frosty Chillists were not “wrong”. They were overtaken by events. Carbon/NOX/methane/other-gases skydumping trapped/is trapping/will trap so much heat as to drown out the “natural cycle” cooldown.

So if manmade global warming cancelled out a coming Frosty Chill Age, will we like the Steamy Heat Age any more than we would have liked a Frosty Chill Age? Perhaps we would have preferred the Goldilocks Age we were in till recently. If we know roughly as much as I think we know about how to force climate hotter or cooler based on light-blockage or heat retention, then I think we can predict that IF we were to get the Greenhouse Skyload back down to where it was in 1960 or so, then we would get the Earth’s heat-budget setting back down to roughly that level.

If it can still even be done any more, it is worth doing. Otherwise, we accept the Steam Heat Age to come, and maybe the Autoclave Future after that.

@different clue,

What I think happened is that the Frosty Chillists were not “wrong”. They were overtaken by events. Carbon/NOX/methane/other-gases skydumping trapped/is trapping/will trap so much heat as to drown out the “natural cycle” cooldown.

I am intuitively inclined to agree, but I must caution that I also think this idea may be seriously oversimplified. I cannot find it right now, but there is a particular graph I am thinking of which shows global temperature averages over the past billion years or so, and a glacial cycle (recurring ice ages) is clearly present towards the more recent time period. However, interestingly, that same graph seems to show that the regularity of the ice age cycle was “broken” before the agricultural influences would have been possible, so it may be that although we are still technically in an interglacial period, the natural cycle might be longer than one would expect from previous cycles. Still, there are confounding problems with my caution as well, one being that I am not entirely certain that the graph in question was scaled so as to accurately represent timing of cycles visually identically, another being that the earliest agricultural influence keeps getting pushed back as archaeology advances. As always, there is too much to read for anyone not getting paid to read it.

will we like the Steamy Heat Age any more than we would have liked a Frosty Chill Age? Perhaps we would have preferred the Goldilocks Age we were in till recently.

To the extent that I care what humans would prefer (it’s a very, very small extent), I would say that since we know we have survived an ice age previously, given the choice between hot or cold we should choose cold. The devil you know, as the saying goes. My longshot hope is that the North Atlantic current that keeps Europe warm will shut down, and resulting snow and ice buildup will increase the albedo enough to counteract the temperature increase pressure coming from the atmospheric changes, thus plunging the globe into another ice age, ending civilization and giving the biosphere a chance to continue indefinitely. Of course if this actually happens, my current home will be totally glaciated but oh well.

Mars Today – A ‘Business-As-Usual’ Model for Earth Tomorrow

Parallels between methane explosions in the Yamal and on Mars – by Dr. David Page

Arctic News, from April.

These explosions on Mars and Earth, both new-to-science, offer a unique opportunity for climatic inquiry across two worlds, having already occurred on Mars and now underway on Earth. Can this ‘snapshot’ of an abrupt, mass-devolatilisation event in-progress tell us anything about current events in Siberia? There is reason to believe that the Siberian explosions are only just beginning as neither the 1000s of onshore lake depressions across the Yamal-Pangody region nor the methane-venting ‘pockmarks’ of the various Arctic sea-floors show any evidence of explosive genesis, having thermokarstic- and subsidence-origins, respectively. What Mars shows is that once a certain permafrost stability threshold is passed, either through increasing temperature or decreasing pressure, the explosive ‘reaction’ appears to cascade.

Not sure whether to put this comment here or in the creating a new paradigm post, since it’s equally relevant to both, but this post is newer so here goes:

By coincidence, these posts appeared as I was reading Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything”, which backs up in great detail and with much documentation everything Ian is saying. (I’m not sure he & Klein agree on everything, but on most of the important points, they do; likewise I disagree w/Klein on population explosion being a “distraction”, but I suppose everyone has a tribalistic bandwagon/myth they are unwilling to question)

Among the most interesting thing I’ve read so far was the breadth and speed of Germany’s transition away from fossil fuels to wind & solar — when this came out they were apparently already at 60% renewables in a very short period of time. Of course, this took massive government action, of the sort you would reasonably expect necessary to fight an odds-against-you war for survival, rather than waiting for energy companies to do something on a pure, short-term profits motive (as Klein points out, quarterly reports and long term salvation are at odds in this crisis).

No time right now to go into more detail on a bunch of subjects, and don’t have the book in front of me to quote, but I *highly* recommend it based on what I’ve read so far.

As to the SW US, contributing to the climate change caused problem is another, distinct one that climate change is exacerbating but which would exist independently–water tables vs. population, lawns, golf courses and agriculture. And more recently, as Ian correctly points out, fracking, which is ruining groundwater that we’re already short of, and contributing to climate change on top of that. Nice destructive feedback cycle.

Best reference I know of to SW US water crisis is Cadillac Desert. Written long ago, saw where we were headed, explains how we got here, and where we are going, even w/out climate change increasing the problems).