We Have Met the (Climate) Enemy

For decades the prevailing assumption has been that the primary enemies of environmental health, the essential aiders and abetters of catastrophic climate change, were the barons of industry, who sacrificed the planet for profit. Undeniably, they played a part. But they are not the main villains of this story.

An example: the speaker at the service-club meeting had done a good job of summarizing the scary, looming effects of climate change, he had the audience’s attention and concern. A questioner raised his hand: “We hear all this dire stuff but nobody ever says exactly what we have to do to avoid it.” 

“Okay,” said the speaker, “let’s start with this; how about a 15% surcharge on all energy produced by fossil fuels to encourage conservation and fund mitigation?” The answer was immediate: “Oh, hell, no!”

And there you have it. The American consumer absolutely refuses to be inconvenienced or penalized in any way in order to deal with a threat that looms over the future of humankind on earth. If you can solve it without interfering with my lifestyle, fine, otherwise, “fuggedaboudit.” Continue reading

What to Call A Gathering of Hypocrites? COP28

Every year, environmental czars and ministers and activists, together with a gaggle of lobbyists and politicians from around the world, mount their private jets and (leaving a haze of contrails behind them) converge on a posh Middle Eastern spa to sip champagne, nibble on caviar and talk about what a good job they are doing saving the environment. The latest United-Nations-sponsored conference called COP28 — because it is the 28th consecutive successful year of the War on Climate Change — convened in Dubai in November. Continue reading

Bowling Gods and Bomb Cyclones and Godzilla Ninos

They have named this year’s “El Nino” the “Godzilla El Nino” and one publication used this illustration to emphasize how scary it is. But is it as scary as what’s really behind it?

When I was little, and got upset because the thunder was too loud or too close, my mother would reassure me by saying the noise was made by the gods bowling in their celestial floating bowling alley. I don’t know how this was supposed to reassure me. The idea of a bunch of drunks — I had watched people bowling — heaving cannonballs at enormous tenpins over my head was anything but reassuring. But by then I had tagged my mother as a congenital liar who had filled my head with nonsense about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and on and on practically my whole life. So I went to my Dad, who had studied meteorology, and asked him for the real story. He sat me down and for half an hour explained the whole thing to me. I didn’t understand a word. Something about electrons. Continue reading

How I Went From Early Adopter to Luddite in One Short Life

The Luddites are mostly remembered as people who hated technology, but they had a larger concern, as do I: the exploitation of people by those who were profiting from the new technology.

For most of my life I relished every technological advance that came my way. I remember when we got electricity at the farm when I was learning to read by the murky light of kerosene lamps. I remember the thrill of being able to illuminate an entire room with brilliant light simply by flicking a switch.

Other blessings followed: a constant supply of hot water; a self igniting furnace controlled by a thermostat that kept the whole house at a constant temperature; a television set that allowed us to watch movies in our living room. I remember the uncharacteristic grin of pure delight on my father’s face when he took me for a ride in our brand new 1953 Oldsmobile to demonstrate the wonders of an automatic transmission.  Continue reading

10 Reasons Our Civilization Will Soon Collapse

[This article, written by Alan Urban for the website okdoomer.io is an updated mirror image of the arguments I made in my 2009 book Brace for Impact. Not many people agree, so I wanted you to see it.]

That’s right. Our entire global industrial civilization is going to collapse. And soon, which means within the lifetimes of most people alive today.

I realize this is quite the claim, and a pretty terrifying one if you’re under 50 or so. In this article, I will list 10 problems the world is facing, each of which could cause the collapse of civilization all on its own. Which means, if even one of these problems isn’t solved, our civilization is doomed.

Before I continue, let me explain what I mean by “collapse.” First of all, it doesn’t necessarily mean that humans will go extinct. While that is certainly a plausible scenario given the many existential threats we are facing, I still believe it is unlikely. Small groups of humans survived in very difficult conditions for tens of thousands of years.

Continue reading……..

Space Junk

NASA’s depiction of the 9.000 satellites and 25,000 pieces of space junk orbiting the earth in low earth orbit (top) from 100 to 1200 miles high, and in geostationary orbit (bottom) 22,000 miles up. These are the items large enough to track — an additional half million or so little bitty bits are up there too. All of them are traveling at 15 times the velocity of your average bullet.

I can’t wait for space tourism to be a thing. Can you?

A Tale of Three Cities

These international environmental conferences are hard work, but somebody has to do it, right?

London, Paris, and Dubai — locations in October and November of 2023 of international conferences on global climate change. Signs that at long last, serious attention is being paid to this existential threat to humanity? Not hardly.

 First out of the gate was the gathering of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in London in the last week of October. Hosted by the right-wing Canadian psychologist, self-help guru and provocateur Jordan Peterson, the ARC’s inaugural  conference featured a parade of speakers telling a sympathetic audience (including the former speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy) to stop worrying about climate change and learn to love fossil fuels and industrial growth. Continue reading

The Rapidly Gathering Storm

It is nothing less than surreal for those of us who expect an imminent collapse of industrial civilization to see the American public and its political leaders either studiously ignore the rapidly mounting evidence of multiple existential threats, or to react in increasingly lunatic ways. A few examples:

James Hansen — one of the first and most strident alarmists about global warming — has participated in a new study that shows the earth is warming faster than anyone predicted. Earlier studies had projected that the earth would warm by 1.5 degrees Celsius in another decade or so. The new study says it will blow through that level, causing widespread crop failures and severe droughts — in a few years.

Breaking news: psychedelic therapies are proving to be effective in treating acute climate anxiety, a “new and growing area” in psychiatry and psychology. Continue reading

The Human Race: Down but Not Out

We’ve been here before, might have to do it again.

An astonishing study using new genetic methods to research human history has discovered evidence that bolsters my long-held belief that the impending crash of industrial society does not necessarily imply the extinction of the human race. My belief has not been based on science, of course — I am not a scientist — but rather on the conviction that the earth is far more varied in its micro-environments, and that people are far more resilient than today’s fragile, air-conditioned population is able to contemplate.

Now comes potential scientific validation. Continue reading

Playing the Averages — and Losing

It is harder every day to have a discussion about any public issue that does not slide quickly into anger over irreconcilable differences. This is partly due to massive, deliberate attempts to pollute our language with lies and conspiracy theories untethered to any notion of reality, a fog of misinformation applied mostly by the far right. But there are other, less obvious culprits. One of the big ones is not political, it’s mathematical. And diabolical. 

It is one of the most pernicious concepts ever invented by mathematicians, the notion of the average — a concept that is virtually meaningless, that not only has nothing to offer our understanding of the world, but actively interferes with it. Continue reading