Hillmarsh
If this turns out to be an extra-hot summer as the long term models are showing, and also droughty, then that will make 4 summers in a row (in my area, which is agrarian) of bad years. It will not take long to seriously damage food supplies at the rate this is going. I haven’t looked into what conditions have been like in the other breadbasket areas like the Ukraine/S. Russia, the Cone of South America, or the fertile parts of East/South Asia.
A lot of these younger leftists are authoritarian and anti-intellectual, and react with hostility to any disagreement with their beliefs. This was a problem on Reddit and it’s a problem on Lemmy. I don’t know what happened to the left, but when I was young they were the intellectual and rational ones. These days, anything other than “fully automated luxury communism” is ecofascism I suppose. Yes, they do take the view that an accurate assessment of our predicament makes you a terrible person.
Also blaming white people for this is inappropriate as there is basically no part of the world today that’s on a sustainable trajectory in the scenario of energy descent.
Probably belongs in the “local observations” thread but all of the employers in my area (Midwestern USA) are doing at least partial RTO – it started midway through 2022 and picked up momentum since. Obviously SWE can easily be done from home with digital meetings, and so it’s just a lot of time and energy wasted commuting. I could see 1x/2 weeks for a sprint meeting or something but the way they are doing this is just absurd. It’s all to shore up control and their CRE which will collapse anyway.
All of which goes to clarify the fact that, pay aside, corporations are really just not the place to be when it comes to innovation or forward thinking.
It’s actually scary that most of the world’s potash comes from 4 countries and 3 of those are currently in hostilities with the USA.
I doubt we will ever see complete shortages even if there are embargoes because they will just sell potash to us via third parties but still… not an antifragile situation at all. And you have to wonder how much is left/how sustainable is the current production.
The piece is generally good, although I’d take issue with the statement that there’s no historical precedent for decline such as we are about to see. The main difference is in the global scale and population numbers in civilization now as versus previous known collapses, e.g. the Roman Empire, the Lowland Mayans, the “Bronze Age Collapse” and so on. But in all those cases, very high population densities were achieved that pushed the limits of their carrying capacity as much as ours do now. And other trends not unlike our context, cultural decadence, mass migration, falling birth rates, etc all made their appearance as well.
Also the “life expectancy not exceeding thirty” claim is commonly repeated but is mistaken. The number was obtained because they did not omit infant mortality from the statistics, whether out of an intention to mislead or simple error I’m not sure, which was much higher in premodern times. Once that is accounted for, Europeans of the so-called “Dark Ages” lived to between their 40s-50s and occasionally 60s. It did represent a falloff of life span but not quite so drastic as is claimed here.
In America I see complacency continuing, because I’ve learned from experience that as long as an oil boom is in progress, you cannot get Americans to accept energy descent as a concept. It will take another Great American Oil Bust like in 2015-20 to wake them up a bit. Even then I don’t know whether Americans can accept the reality of limits, because they have a natural optimism that is hard to pierce.
Observing American health care firsthand thanks to ill relatives, I can say that it still functions but it is probably a few years at most to collapse. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services budget is about 15% funded and getting worse each year. Wait times for specialty appointments are months, surgery a half-year at least (unless urgent/life-threatening), care impossible to access – many people have to go to the ED just for diagnosis. Life expectancy down significantly in the last 10 years. We won’t escape Canada’s fate.
The homeless population increasing in a geometric ratio is something I have also seen in the USA. Luckily it has been a very mild winter or we would likely have large numbers of people freezing to death here as well.
I used to live in MN and there was a while there when the insect population had dropped critically low. Certain species like the native ladybirds appeared to disappear completely, replaced by the Eurasian invasive ones. And the monarch butterflies almost disappeared as well, but the practice of leaving prairie buffers on the edges of farms in the western part of the state seems to have helped their numbers recover. By the time I left, you would see monarchs in the summertime again. I still have grave concerns about biota in America though, as I suspect there will be major abuse of wild habitat as energy descent takes hold.
In the Upper Midwestern USA, we have had an unprecedented warm spell this winter, with almost no snow in December, and the mildest winter on record thus far. The only blip was a minor cold snap of below-zero wind chills for just over a week, and that just ended in the past couple of days. Now we are in a January thaw that looks to cause an entire melting off of the snow cover, which I don’t recall ever happening before during January in my life. This pattern is the result of a combination of overall warming and a “Super El Nino” pattern in the Pacific this year.
That’s fine as long as people can admit to themselves that energy throughput with renewables is going to be a fraction of what it was in the age of abundant fossil fuels. And the problem I see is that most people touting green energy are either unrealistic or mendacious about this. We still haven’t got past the phase of people thinking they will keep their consumer and commuter friendly lifestyles in the coming decades.