There’s been a lot of attention, much of it apocalyptic, paid to Trump’s election, but Trump is just a symptom of one of our three main issues.
In order of importance, they are:
- Climate Change and Ecological Collapse;
- Mass disabling, largely due to Covid; and,
- The End of the Western Era, and the collapse of American hegemony.
If we manage a nuclear war during the collapse of American hegemony, it’ll turn out to have been the most important issue, but I’m betting we’ll avoid it. If I’m wrong, you won’t be able to tell me so.
But just as important as warming is the collapse of biodiversity, loss of habitat and species. We are able to live and live well because other species form the network of life, which keep the atmosphere breathable, soil fertile and feed us. Worse, we just don’t understand these systems, we can’t create the simplest of biospheres: if it goes awry, we will have a hell of a time fixing it, and the loss of genetic diversity means a vast swathe of scientific advances will be cut off, especially medical advances.
(The below #s are from 2018, the situation is accelerating, and will be worse now.)
Average case scenarios for climate change and ecological collapse mean billions of deaths for humans a world with a significantly reduced carrying capacity. Recovery, especially of species, will take so much time that on the human timescale, it might as well be “never.”
Meanwhile, the Covid epidemic continues and we’re at risk for other viral plagues. If Covid just killed people, that would be bad, but the mass disabling is a huge problem and even people who aren’t symptomatic have suffered real damage.
This chart is from 2023, so it’s behind the curve, but it indicates the issues. (UK)
There’s no particular reason to expect this to end. We aren’t doing anything about Covid. Here’s a projection chart:
Having to care for large numbers of disabled people at the same time as everything else is going to shit is… bad. Very bad. There’s a reason why assisted suicide is becoming legal.
We could do something about Covid. Many things. But we refuse.
The End of the European Era is probably a good thing, but world hegemonic transitions are nasty. The last one led to two world wars. The Chinese are striving mightily to avoid “Thucydides trap.”
The Ukrainian and Gazan wars, plus the Yemen blockade which is part of the Gaza war are best seen as part of the death throes of the American empire. But it’s not just America which is losing power, Europe is shedding industry, has fallen behind on technology and is in serious, probably terminal decline.
The Western era, which is four to five centuries old, depending on how you count it (the case for 4 centuries is that in 1500 the Ottomans and Chinese were still vastly powerful) is coming to an end. China is re-taking its place as the most important nation in the world. I’d argue it has already done so. Russia, which has been Europe facing and European aspirational for centuries now looks East and is a junior ally of China’s.
China doesn’t want war with America. It doesn’t need a war. Absent a war, it’s already won, it just has to sit back and watch America continue its decline. Trump is not going to “make America great again”, that ship has sailed. What needs to be done to make it happen are policies (including real industrial policy and a collapse of asset prices and rent, plus increases in real wages) which are anathema to most of America’s elites, and which, in any case, they are incompetent to implement.
But hegemonic powers rarely go easy into that long night, and a world war is entirely possible. American elites don’t want to lose their pre-eminence, and they still have a powerful military (or think they do) and a lot of nuclear weapons.
So this transition period is one of great danger, potentially for everyone in the world.
These are the three big issues, everything else is trivial in comparison. Trans rights, wokeism, AI… whatever, are all rounding errors on these three issues.
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The worst of it is that we’re not going to handle the first one: climate change and ecological collapse. We’ve already made that decision. Even if we immediately started doing everything right, they’re now self-reinforcing, and we aren’t going to do everything right. Trump, after all, ran on drill, drill, drill. The Chinese are doing more than anyone else, with a massive build-out of renewable energy, but their system is still an extractive and polluting industrial economy with massive freeways and so on.
The only “good” sign is one that many are bewailing: collapsing birth rates. Human population is in clear overshoot, and it needs to be reduced. Yes, in theory we could increase Earth’s carrying capacity so that a massive population decrease wouldn’t be necessary, but we’re not going to.
Ecological issues are in the bucket of “fix them or nature will fix them for you” and we’ve chosen not to.
Keep these three issues at the forefront of your mind, your analysis and your planning for your personal future. Compared to them, everything else barely matters.
Soredemos
The thing with culture war issues like transrights isn’t that it matters (it doesn’t, systemically, though it matters to the people it mutilates or whose sports careers it ruins). It’s a cynical tool for distracting people and energy from real politics (literally, the setting of policy. Many languages don’t even distinguish between ‘policy’ and ‘politics’)
KT Chong
Not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, I think I have, but I’m gonna say it again.
Our planet Earth is actually a living orgasm. Oceans are its blood. Trees are its tissues. The lands are its bones. The animals are its cells. Humans are the cancer cells, and our growth has gone out of control and is killing the planet. COVID 19 was just the planet’s immune system trying to fight off the cancer, and the defense was unsuccessful. I expect us to see more attempts from the planet’s internal defense mechanism to fight the cancer: I expect too see more pandemic outbreaks.
By the way, the climate is also the planet’s immune system trying to fight off the sickness. When a human gets sick, she has a fever and her body temperature rises as her immune system attempts to fight off the sickness. The same is happening with climate change. The planet is trying to kill us off because we are a sickness.
Jan Wiklund
The western era is two centuries old. Europe overcame China and India only around 1800, says Andre Gunder Frank in ReOrient, 1998. The arguments are perhaps a little to angry, but they are mightily persuasive.
bruce wilder
I suppose people, being people, are always more or less, collectively and typically, idiotic.
Still, I cannot help but reflect on how remarkably disabled our politics is by a very low standard of education and analysis. I think this is true of both the “average” level of literacy and the elite standard of sophisticated, reflective thought. The ability of people collectively to reason together or to take counsel from those who can be reliably identified as wiser and better informed — that ability seems to me to be under sustained assault. I know this complaint maybe sounds like the raving of an old man, which it objectively is, but I am thinking that I see a lot of evidence that the quality of thinking on the subjects Ian identifies is seriously handicapped. Even, or maybe especially in elite publications, there is just a lot of ignorant dumb.
I don’t think much of the quality of polemics on climate change, even or especially that of people who have taken it upon themselves to advocate for “doing something”. It isn’t, imho, merely that they are getting drowned out by the propaganda of fossil fuel interests. The would-be Cassandras — large numbers of them at least — have been lazy and corrupt, ill-informed and in denial, all along. Lots of minimizing the difficulty of coordinating on political solutions, even before they started meeting in Doha! (Irony really is dead.)
The information vacuum on the Ukraine War is something I have commented on repeatedly. Right now, Biden giving permission for Ukraine to use their ATACMS (all 8 of them?) against targets in Russia (well, maybe only Kursk) because of non-existent North Koreans just illustrates the absurdity it induces.
COVID is just an knowledge and information black hole and was from the beginning. Elite institutions like the CDC have completely lost credibility and for good reasons.
Curt Kastens
1. Climate Change and Environmental Collapse
2. US deep state attempts to maintain the US empire
3. World wide critical resource deplition
4. A world population that is for the most part delusional.
5. What kind of pickle is the most tasty. I prefer Spreewalder.
Sumi
I agree with the three main issues you’ve flagged. But I think you’re too quick to dismiss genderism as unimportant. Gender ideology undermines the credibility of every organization that embraces it. It’s become so normal to laugh off things like climate change or Covid prevention because “you can’t trust scientists anymore, they can’t even tell male from female!” Given the outrageous and harmful genderist falsehoods peddled by some biologists, social scientists and even medical organizations is it any wonder that people extrapolate that the entire scientific apparatus is untrustworthy?
Nate Wilcox
@bruce wilder Great comment!
Absolutely spot-on.
Another crazy making phenomenon is the habit of Democratic Party voters to take what is intended as constructive criticism and honest debate as an attack on them and their parasocial relationships with the politicians they follow.
Any dissent or skepticism is read as treason and a threat.
And I chose the term follow very much deliberately because of its meaning on social media.
elkern
Good list. My only amendment would be to put Biological Warfare in there somewhere, but not sure whether it belongs under #2 or #3.
Adams
@ Jan Wikland Thanks for mentioning AGF. Don’t think I’ve ever seen his name on the innertubes, except when I put it up. Brilliant, well-traveled, polyglot economist who made international analysis understandable to the average newspaper reader. And he could support his meta-analysis with data from (then) popular media articles available to anyone with access to a reasonably well -stocked library. One of my personal favorites along with Veblen and Dobbs.
Oakchair
2. Mass disabling, largely due to Covid; and,
——–
A relatively benign infectious agent can turn into a mass grave if the population it spreads through is bathed in a slew of heavy metals, plastics, hormones, junk food, and industrial waste.
People who die and suffered severe after effects from Covid are typically people who already have one or more chronic illnesses.
Chronic illness begets worse outcomes from stressors such as infections, environmental poisons, and poverty.
The percent of children in America with chronic illness was less than 10% in the 1970’s. Before Covid that rate had increased to near 50%.
The only attention the media, medical industry, FDA, and CDC have given to this tragedy is to insult anyone who even suggests that perhaps we should stop soaking our children in industrial chemicals, and pharmaceuticals.
Arthur
Now here comes Doc Oz! At this point it’s obvious this is all a joke. Trump and MAGA have no desire whatsoever to fix any of the problems facing humanity. To be fair neither did/do the democrats. Western civilization is finished. I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but in the long runs it’s in bad shape too. After the die off there will be humanity, but any sort of industrial civilization will be a memory. That’s probably a good thing, though.
And now a short story. Years ago I used to know a guy, nice guy, who said that deep down we know we have no real future. He based this on the fact that few people in power of any kind really talked about posterity. You know, how will a certain action effect the 7th generation of the 7th generation sort of thing. I agreed then and do now.
It’s really the only way to explain how things are. We know the game is over, so let’s go out with a bang and have some fun. Sad, I know, but it does explain a lot.
Carborundum
The notion that we’re looking at a steady increase in the percentage of the population suffering from disabling long COVID at the magnitude of those projections doesn’t seem to be borne out by the evidence. We simply don’t see a third of the population down with significant medical issues. There’s definitely something going on, but it’s not a third of the population disabled.
Having looked at the updated data Rauvola based his visualization on and replicating his analytical procedure, the increase in the percentage of the economically active population not seeking work due to long-term sickness levelled off shortly after his time series ends. His series topped out at 1.53 percentage points above an arbitrary mean 2014 rate. It then rose to 1.71 in October of ’23 and has stayed range-bound roughly around that point (mean 1.66, SD 0.06) since then.
mago
Living off the grid, self sufficient with water, food and energy. Living off the land. Living in a sixties counter culture dream. Hey Mr Fantasy.
Actually I do live off the grid, and I know my way around food—its cultivation, preservation, storage and cooking.
So what? When the planet cooks your goose, it’s done.
We live in a world of interdependence, so you can’t run and you can’t hide. When “it” comes down to you, it’s Up2U.
Not to be a smart ass. Just saying. . .
someofparts
KTC – FWIW every mass extinction event in the history of our planet was precipitated when the dominant species du jour expanded beyond its proper niche.
Also just learned that one of the closing lines in Paradise Lost describe the attitude behind of the carnage that is destroying our world – ‘better or reign in hell than serve in heaven’ (and that’s a paraphrase because I haven’t read Milton).
B Wilder – Another way to describe the loss of capacity you describe is a dark age. We are entering a dark age, at least in this corner of the world, and what we are seeing is what it looks like from the inside when a people fall into one.
Jessica
For the US to reindustrialize would require a drastic cultural shift such that skilled manual work and knowledge associated with it would be highly respected and financial and gamesmanship administrative would be despised. I don’t see any force in the US even vaguely capable of this.
Many of Trump’s supporters among the ordinary folk would welcome this but not his elite supporters and not the crypto folks.
Curt Kastens
It is about God Damn Time!!
I have been saying that the COVID Pamdemic was a military Psy Op from about 6 or 8 weeks in to the Proclaimed Pandemic. As Far as I know I was the only one saying it out loud.
Now it appears that there is actually a government official in Belgium confirming my understanding of what was going on!!
Of course I recognize that this does not prove that I was right. What this govenment official says does not explain a lot of things. Such as why Iran went along with the mainstream Covid story. Or why Life insurance companies paid out on more life insurance policies during this time. But I am sure that answers can be found for these things if someone were ever to get to the bottom of the story.
After all the reason that I (tenatively) decided that the whole world wide story was a psy op was because of all the holes in all of the competing narratives about the pandemic.
sadly there is not a damned thing that any of us can do to change things at this point.
But the good news is that we have one less thing to worry about.
Here is the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqv2YMn0q2o
someofparts
If AGF is Veblen level this needs to be in my library. Thanks for the heads-up.
Curt Kastens
It looks to me like there is a news black out in the western msm about the revelations provided by the Dutch Minister of Health. I am not surprised.
Soredemos
@KT Chong
It’s isn’t though. That’s cute and poetic, but in any literal sense the ‘Gaia Theory’ is complete nonsense. Evolution doesn’t work like that. An entire gestalt system isn’t subject to evolutionary pressures like individual lifeforms. In fact it isn’t subject to them at all.
Even conceptually, for the idea to hold any weight the planetary immune system would have had to kill off humans long before we inflicted the level of damage we have (and will continue to do for decades to come). As is, the planet as it was simply won’t continue to exist. Vast number of species extinct. Something will survive, because something always does, but it won’t look much like it did even three hundred years ago. If the planet is a lifeform and climate change is the immune system, it’s a dogshit immune system, not fit for purpose.
Curt Kastens
There is also a story about WHY Fluer Agema is telling this story about the role of the NATO command structure in the Covid Pandemic that will hopefully be known someday and the WHY of the timming of the release.
ProNewerDeal
Ian/others, what do you forecast for the future of humans’ response to Covid?
1 Is a sterilizing immunity (perhaps nasal) vaccine likely and when?
2 Are we Long Covid (per Dr Al Aly research – symptoms that make one disabled to work, plus organ damage, and cancer-increasing T-cell reduction, etc) Denial Bubble? If the bubble bursts, at least it would not be possibly job market/socially limiting to wear an N95 mask. Even better if there was a Indoor Air Filtration New Deal for at least the most Covid-risky buildings like hospitals/schools/public transit.
3 Are any nations currently not biased against N95 mask wearers? It seems like in the East Asia nations, even if it is a minority of mask wearers, their individual choice is respected and not ostracized.
In my view, these are huge questions. The sustainability of certain careers, romantic partners, public-vs-home school for children; depends on these 3 questions.
PS – to the “Covid Affects Only The Unhealthy” Deniers/Minimizers, pls note cases like 35 year old All-Star NHL hockey player Jonathan Toews. Modern pro athletes in the top global leagues have specialists on nutrition, strength/cardio trainings to advise them; + world class healthcare. If Long Covid can disable a world class young athlete, it can affect anyone.
Curt Kastens
God People are Morons. Warren Buffet says that the US can not repay its debt. That people would report that Warren Buffet said that just shows that it is impossible to teach people something that they do not want to learn.
The world now lives with Fiat Currencies. It is impossible for a nation with its own fiat currency to go bankrupt. A nation does not even need to print more money. It just needs to add another decimal to its debt. It is nothing more that a one key stroke computer entry.
This does not mean that there is no cost to government borrowing. The potential problem is not bankruptcy. The potential cost of government borrowing is high or hyper inflation. There is a well known remedy for this potential problem of high or hyper inflation though. It is called taxation. But a fair tax policy will never again be implemented any where. At least not in the western world where most of the readers of this site live. Oligarchs do not like fair taxation policies. That is why they like the talk to center around bankruptcy so that the talk will not center around taxation.
The reason that I want to write about this subject here is that hyper inflation should actually be on the list of the most important issues facing humanity. It is an important issue not only in its own right but there is a closely related issue of the what sorts of negative consequences will we have to suffer when the oligarchs say that inflation has to be brought under control. It will clearly be brought under control not through fair taxation but through demand destruction.
I know that climate change and environmental collapse are real because I can see the effects of it in my every day life. I can not see it first hand on a world wide scale. But I can believe that it is happening on a world wide scale because the reports that are comming in from all over the world are similar to what is happening in my part of the world.
I know that the conflict between the west and all the rest is real because althought there is massive disagreement over the statestics there is massive agreement over the broad storyline. I know that this conflict is important because in the near term it uses up large amounts of resources that could otherwise be used to meet the needs of people that are suffering. I know that it is important because it could lead to nuclear war if one side thinks that it will lose.
I know that resource deplition is real and important. I may not be able to travel around the world and verify that how much oil or natural gas is being pumped at a particular spot. But I know that expecting any non renewable resource to be able to contribute to economic growth of 1 or 2 or 3 percent a year for an indefinate period is insane.
When I compare all the different Covid narratives that have been trotted out over the past 4 years and the small slice of what I have been able to see ( or just as importantly not see) for myself over the past almost 5 years. Covid does not even get in to the same ballpark as Climate Change/ Environmental Collapse, Resource Deplition, World War, and Economic Exploitation by the oligarchs against the rest of us.
And so what if Covid is terrible and does not get dealt with. The other things on the list are not going to get dealt with either.
I am not going to spend one second worring about Covid because a 35 year old NHL Hockey star has some kind of health issues because only God knows what figuratively speaking. That is about as scary as seeing something in the New York Post that a movie star got flesh eating bacteria infection and lost her face and then lost her hands and then died and then 3 days latter came back to life with rabies.
Curt Kastens
I am about to write a comment in the open thread section about an unimported issue facing humanity.
ProNewerDeal
To the Covid Minimizers, note that
1 Excess Deaths relative to 2019 were up in almost every nation. Among the few exceptions were New Zealand & China, until they flip-flopped from ZeroCovid to LetErRip and then their Excess Death pattern also became like most nations.
2 Multiple nations reporting alarming increase working-age (25-64?) disability
3 Multiple pro-capatilist life insurance execs noting alarming increase working-age Excess Deaths. IIRC a Murican life insurance exec said it was up 40pct in his customer base.
IIRC Ian has already written posts here explaining this Covid excess morbidity/mortality trend, with more detail and eloquence than my comment did.
Stormcrow
@someofparts
Where in heaven’s name did you collect this bit of misinformation?
The Triassic-Permian extinction is generally considered to be the result of a massive volcanic event, whose most obvious geological fossils, the Siberian Traps, have received extensive study. That does not require that a “dominant species du jour expands beyond its proper niche”. All it requires is a sufficiently large magma plume, chewing its way up through the crust. TTBOMK, magma plumes are not biological phenomena.
Have you’ve ever run across mention of the Chixculub impactor? I didn’t think so.
Please do some elementary homework.
Stormcrow
ProNewerDeal:
Thank you.
For the benefit of the (hopefully very few) commenters here who haven’t yet absorbed the thrust of several of Ian’s posts about this …
The only good thing about this pandemic is that it’s taught some of us how simple it is to protect our respiratory systems from dangerous particulates, be they virus-laden aerosols or PM2.5 wildfire ash.
Ian’s recommendation of systematic use of N95 masks is right on target. There’s not much we can do to reverse the collapse of the very idea of public health. But we can protect our own lungs, if we can afford to allow our neighbors to think us a bit daft.
My own neighbors are apparently quite used to the sight of me in my elastomeric, which is the only way they’ve had a chance to see me for almost three years now.
And I no longer fear the next repeat of 2020, when the AQI in the Metro Seattle area stank to the very throne of god, courtesy of wildfires several state borders away.
Given my extended ugly history of chronic obstructive respiratory disease, I suspect that I should have been fertilizing a cemetery lawn at least two years ago.
But as things are, I’ve managed to duck colds and influenza, not to mention Covid, since shortly after the pandemic got rolling.
Curt Kastens
So you Covid maximilists want us to worry about Covid when we are facing near term threats that are going to kill billions over a four year period and probably lead to human extinction by 2050.
If it is not crazy enough to be frightened of Covid, the solution to this “scary” desease is that we we filter our air and wear masks so that we will eventually so weaken our immune systems that instead of sneezing when we inhale to much pepper we die of anthropoligical shock.
Hahahahaha
Curt Kastens
Although a lot of us have Climate Change/ Environmental Collapse as our number one issue, I think that we all need to reconsider that. Environmental/Industrial Collapse has now clearly moved to a point where it is going to happen weather we like it or not.
Therefore it seems to me that by default Imperialism and its conjoined twin economic exploitation is the most important issue facing humanity. I do not like the Russian governments war against the LGB community. Nor do I like the Iranian Governments war against women. But on the most important issue they are on the right side of history.