Ecological Collapse Supersedes Financial Collapse

 

Seven Pillars Nature Preserve

Things are quickly gathering steam as I mentioned last week. This post (use Google translate) was shared by Alice Friedemann, and it pushes back against a recent post by Art Berman. There is a big difference between fossil fuel reserves and what can actually realistically be extracted. What there is in the ground is only partially relevant, as if it can't be extracted, it is irrelevant and will become a stranded asset. More pushback came from many others, even after Berman tried to explain further. 

Speaking of Alice, she has a new post up (based on that article [first link] above) about the month of the zenith of civilization...spoiler alert: it was May of 2024. She also has another post about another topic I've brought up several times just recently - what is commonly referred to as "spermageddon." The fact remains (according to the studies) that human fertility is expected to fall to zero by 2045. This means that we are functionally extinct, which I would say is true even without spermageddon being in the picture. Many other ecologists and biologists agree with George Tsakraklides in this article about how our brains aren't adapted for the level of technology in use today and the hyperobjects that are simply too large for most people to understand. 

Most of my regular readers know all about collapse - socially, financially, and ecologically. What we are witnessing currently in the U.S. is social collapse. Financial collapse is just around the corner, as this appears to be what this administration is trying to accomplish. Welcome to 1930s Germany. Still, even without the ridiculously stupid ideas being attempted in the U.S. now, financial collapse is imminent anyway. Despite the claims of plenty of energy reserves, this ignores the fact that we now have over 350 million more people than we had in Oct./Nov. of 2018, which is more people than the entire population of the United States! While we may be able to extract more energy than the peak in 2018, most of this energy (if not all) is already spoken for by increased population, increased energy use for the AI being utilized to accomplish this, and the reduced EROEI, requiring far more energy in the extraction process itself. Without the energy needed to keep the economy afloat, interest on debt cannot be serviced, and debt begins to spiral out of control. The reason these attempts are stupid is because they can only increase overshoot, making all existing symptom predicaments worse instead of better. We have an interesting ability to continue pushing ourselves backward faster and faster. Berman's arguments may be true, but none of it essentially changes anything other than continuing to increase overshoot and making all the existing predicaments worse. 

More concerning to me than financial collapse is ecological collapse. Financial or economic collapse isn't a death sentence whereas ecological collapse unfolding now actually is. Sooner or later, a keystone species gets removed causing a trophic cascade or co-extinction or any other method of removing habitat for many species. The H5N1 HPAI is killing many different bird species involving millions of individuals. It's also killing off many other mammals as well. Certainly as fewer and fewer individual birds remain, this will have a devastating impact on many different areas as time moves forward. If these individuals can be replaced in short order, then perhaps the overall impact will be lighter. Still, less birds means more insects, especially mosquitoes, which means more mosquito-borne disease such as West Nile, Triple E, Dengue Fever, St. Louis Encephalitis, Malaria, Chikungunya, Zika, and Yellow Fever. We're one step away from full-blown disaster with human-to-human spread of bird flu which will make COVID look like a picnic in the park.

Interestingly enough, a new study has uncovered that Zika hijacks our own skin on a molecular basis, making infected individuals more appealing to mosquitoes. By altering the metabolism of the skin, the Zika virus guarantees its own survival, resulting in turning humans into mosquito magnets. 

Ecological collapse has many causes, although practically all of them have been fostered into reality by our species and possibly some of our ancestors. We're not the only ones who have done this, as other species in the historical record have brought about their own demise as well. The one thing that frustrates so many people is the existence of our intelligence. They think that we should be able to figure this out as smart as we are and come up with a solution. "WE should be able to fix this!" they say. But this denies the reality that this is a predicament with an outcome, not a problem with a solution. 

In connection with understanding overshoot, once one also understands the nature of civilization and all the subsystems of it, the Maximum Power Principle (MPP), wetiko, Jevons paradox, the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, and how we arrived at this point in time, one realizes that this was always the way things were going to turn out. Politics is one of those subsets of civilization and has no ability to change the dynamics of the overall system of civilization, meaning that the system will remain unsustainable regardless of how we power it, how we apply labels to change the public's perception of it, whether we dumb society down or not, whether or not climate change is allowed to be publicized or not, or any other attempt at changing the narrative or rationalization of the situation. We simply lack agency to be able to change the essence of who and what we are as a species and the system we live within likewise is unchangeable. That last link is to an article by Dave Pollard which really points out our utter lack of agency and this quote stands out:

"But there is another way of interpreting Aaron’s statement that is, IMO, both fairer and in a way even more terrifying. And that is:

• that we have no choice in what we do, every moment of our lives; our behaviour is entirely conditioned by our biology and our culture, given the circumstances of the moment;
• that our world and its human systems are so massively complex, interconnected and evolved to resist change, that believing ‘we’ (as individuals and groups) can somehow intervene in these systems to reform or change them in the ways we would ideally like to, is simply naïve, wishful thinking that fails to understand how large complex systems actually work (sorry Donella and Margaret); and
• the crises we are currently facing are predicaments, not problems; as such they have no ‘solutions’, and the only effective response to them is to adapt ourselves to them, rather than trying to ‘fix’ them in ways that are inevitably hubristic and could easily make these predicaments even worse.

This is equally true for our ‘inaction’, and our ignorant and arrogant ‘actions’ (eg denial, geoengineering, etc.) in the face of climate and ecological collapse, and in the face of the accelerating disintegration of our economic, political, social and other systems as our civilization declines and falls apart."

So, at the end of the day, I don't see this change in predictions from Art Berman as actually changing much (if anything) in a positive manner. All the same forces making life on this planet difficult will only continue and be made worse from the exact same issue(s) that this blog was founded upon: our behavior of technology use causing overshoot and the myriad symptoms of overshoot. In other words, having more energy made available to the system of civilization doesn't actually help us, it's a trap that binds us to the inevitable outcome. The longer we continue these arrangements, the quicker our extinction happens once the party is over.

Hopefully all this finds you doing well, given the circumstances. Now's the time to stretch out, take a breather, and enjoy some relaxing pictures from East Lynn Lake.