Always entertaining to see how socialists think climate change is adequate justification for upending the global economy and governance, but not enough to build nuclear power plants.
I understand why Europe and North America has to get its house in order, and I share your optimism that we can do it. But, as you note, the real problem now lies in Asia, especially China and India. With those countries committing to carbon neutrality in the 2050s to 2070s, and with the regular addition of new coal-fired electricity generators, how can we do enough to offset what they are doing? How can we convince them to speed up decarbonization? Especially when we are at logger-heads with China.
This is something I don't understand about the proponents of socialism here. How will their proposals help with China and India, and hence, how are they a solution to anything?
The more optimistic was is through technology improvements, as also noted by Noah. If we can break through and make non-carbon generation cheap enough, Asian countries will want to decarbonize. And if we can master techniques to remove carbon from the atmosphere cheaply enough, we can contribute to global solutions, not just national or regional ones.
And yet, many progressives remain deeply suspicious of any technology-based attempts at solutions. I'm afraid that they still haven't taken climate change seriously.
Pretty much. Some smart leftists (and others) have realized that any solution predicated on social change or people going against their short-term self-interest just isn’t going to happen (short of extremely violent and unpleasant events like a world war or French/Russian/Chinese revolution). So yeah, we pretty much have to bank on technology (shooting sulfur in to the sky, etc.). But a lot of “leftists” (and on the right too) are really performative cosplayists. They’re not actually as interested in solving the world’s problems as much as working out their own personal issues in public. And that too is understandable with the modern world we live in. Humans intrinsically desire agency and if this neoliberal world doesn’t provide them with enough, they’ll get it through cosplay.
I know people who are firmly committed to the apocalyptic view (things will either get dramatically worse or dramatically better) and I'm convinced it's a question of psychology in which the facts are mostly irrelevant. Some people just have doomy personalities and whatever happens in the outside world gets refracted through that. Social media probably makes it worse since they now talk primarily to each other, not to a random selection of people in meatspace.
Articles like Noah's are useful for people who aren't quite that badly off, and want to see factual evidence when they try to decide whether the world is getting better, getting worse, or something more ambiguous. But the real doomsayers won't even process something like this piece.
I think an interesting question is actually around social media and the ‘meta verse’ and how much of our feeling of unrest is tied into new and unprecedented forms of communication. How much has this just accelerated trends that would have already happened and how much is it a true historical turning point? For example, how much should we fear the ‘time of disinformation’?
Jan 28, 2022·edited Jan 28, 2022Liked by Noah Smith
Being old enough to remember the 80s gives me a different perspective. In the 80s the big concern was global warming (it was global cooling in the 70s) ending the world by 2000, only way to prevent it was to go solar (nuclear was too dangerous) - I still remember middle school teachers giving us art and craft assignments about how we will deal with all this when the world is underwater.
Time has taught me that these apocalyptic visions are largely the result of the neurotic LCDs in society who need to constantly rationalize their anxiety.
Humanity has survived for billions of years, we have never had it better. What matters now (as always) is to use technology to mitigate risks on the horizon - e.g., Dutch dike technology to perimeter key coastal areas at risk of flooding from climate change in the next hundred or so years, go all-in on nuclear energy etc. - not constantly indulge the neurotics in their delusions.
I think that while this is true, the scale and scope of the effort required to decarbonize our economies entirely in the next half century shouldn't be underestimated! Sure, the doomsayers are neurotic, but we have a lot of work to do!
I'm optimistic about the future, too, but you overestimate humanities' duration by a factor of about 10,000. Humanity has existed for 300,000 years, not "billions." Not to mention agriculture has only been around for 12,000 years. As far as the existence of earth goes, human societies are the new hotness, and it's not inconceivable that they could burn themselves out in relatively short order!
Of course, I was using "humanity" loosely, including our primate ancestors from which we branched off 6-8 million years ago, and even older tree and water based life forms.
Key point is that climate change is a threat that is best dealt by technological solutions, not neurotic activism that has created this post-Christian apocalyptic religion out of it, and that keeps pushing the doomsday date every decade or so.
We need more Elon Musks, and Boyan Slats, not Greta Thurnbergs.
"In the 80s the big concern was global warming (it was global cooling in the 70s)"
I have many books about environmental issues written in the 70s and the main problem that they talk was about global warming created by CO2; the idea that in the 70s the big concern was global cooling seems a bit of historical revisionism, plus some cherry-picking.
Jan 28, 2022·edited Jan 28, 2022Liked by Noah Smith
Taking the opportunity to do my usual recommendation to read The Wizard and The Prophet by Charles Mann...
Also, well done Noah! My lifetime spans a large proportion of the era you survey here. I was a young child in the 70s, but growing up in the Detroit area the combination of Cold War stress, segregation-related tension, industrial pollution, and economic doldrums (plus tornado drills!) was palpable even to kids. My father worked in the auto industry, and the conventional wisdom was that US cars were s*** and the Japanese were kicking our butts and would do so forever.
At some point during the 80s I realized that, huh, things weren't so bad anymore. During the 90s, I recall reading a dead-tree newspaper column by somebody like Charles Krauthammer marvelling at the amazingly quiescent state of the world (End of History and all that) and thinking, well, it's not THAT great! I can't remember what my younger self took umbrage at, but looking back, wow, spot on.
There was no epiphany about the ebb and flow of progress, despair, and muddling through. It has always taken me a while to understand that we have collectively taken a few steps forward. But it's been a consistent theme. Even now, when you choose to dig into a lot of these issues (I was able to do so during a research fellowship last year), you will often see little rays of hope. It's easier for me to stay open to this when I stay away from most media, mass and social. .
I find this article really funny given that there is an extreme likelihood of a Republican wave in this year's elections. The only question now is how large.
1) The Red Wave *is* the radical change. There is a possibility of a multi-decade or even 100 year historic change in Congressional representation.
2) If there is a Red Wave, I believe we can agree that the US isn't going to do squat on climate change. Not that it has, really, anyway. Point being, no radical change in this area for sure.
3) The supposition: socialism or barbarism - related to 1), maybe the real question is conservatism or economic calamity (the traditional Republican condemnation of socialism).
Note that I believe that the most likely outcome of a 2022 Red Wave is an extension of the dinosaurian wing of the Republican party; the lack of need to run real candidates standing for real issues means the GOP is going to run even more of the oligarchic boot lickers than normal - but this isn't any different than the Democrats running against Trump.
The problem is - Biden clearly doesn't have the energetic (or rabid, depending on your POV) base of Trump.
Really Good Article! The same is here in Europe. Not as divided as the US but everywhere the mood that everything is getting worse...
So let`s see for example my Home Country Italy! There where the so called " Anni di Piombo" = Years of Lead... In this Years from 1969 to 1983 extremist Groups realized more than 14.000 attacks in Italy... Attacks from the far Left (Brigate Rosse) and much more the far Right... Overall this Attacks killed 374 people and wounded over 1170.
And now people are talking that everything ist worse than previous decades... It`s crazy...
Here is the Englisch Wikipedia Artikel for some quick Infos:
I actually think the performative rage of social media helps to prevent actual rage on the streets. Much in the way video games kept teenagers off the streets and helped reduce street crime. If kids are awake at 2am now they are in the rooms gaming, not in the streets bored and looking for trouble. Social media, Twitter rage, what have you, makes people feel like they are doing something without having to mix up any kitchen sink Semtex.
Re “America’s great strength is that we freak out about everything, thus bestirring ourselves to early action when other countries might have let problems fester too long. If all goes well, 20 years from now we’ll look back on the 2020s as when society started to become sane again and we started to rebuild after a decade of chaos and rage.”
I wish I could believe that were possible. It would be nice “if all goes well” and society started to become sane again —and I know you’re saying it could go either way — but I don’t share any of the optimism. None.
We’re up to our eyeballs in an uncontrolled pandemic which was most likely caused by a lab leak followed by a clumsy coverup— which (while a few are speculating about it) essentially no one is doing a thing about. We’re not talking about biosafety. We’re not talking about international oversight of viral research. We’re not discussing the type of really useless research that creates super-viruses supposedly for benevolent purposes.
These viruses can be made for a few hundred bucks, with the skills of a grad student. Sure, I remember the 80s, thinking the world might end in a nuclear armageddon, but these viruses, and accidents, are way more dangerous. Almost incalculably more so. There’s no one to exercise the equivalent restraint with a virus, to hold the equivalent of the nuclear football. We don’t need multiple people entering their codes before disaster is unleashed. We just need some sloppy lab workers and a slightly worse virus, and here we go again. Life as we know it could be over next time. That’s how important this is, and that’s how stupid we are being.
I don’t necessarily think it’s true that we Americans freak out early about things, really. We freak out about the wrong things, like the “coup” that really wasn’t a serious threat. It wasn’t even “almost a coup.” It was kind of a joke. A dangerous joke to be sure, enabled by the Capitol police opening the gates as it it was a party, but a joke.
Meanwhile: We’re a wealthy nation, but one of the last in the world to provide health care to our people. A pandemic killing a million of us hasn’t even bumped that up the agenda to be a serious topic of discussion. We are _never_ getting health care for all, if the short-sighted oligarchs have anything to say about it.
It’s not an early freakout, or a late freakout. It’s business as usual.
We’ve nudged our political system more and more toward one that rewards only stupid/shallow/compliant legislators voting how they’re told to vote on pre-written legislation created by special interests which they don’t bother to read, such that in a real crisis, ****we don’t even have anyone capable of responding****. Our last two presidents have been a narcissistic dimwitted buffoon and a literal dotard. Things are so bad that people like Amash and Gabbard — who actually wanted to serve the American people— simply gave up and left.
That “coup” was some made-for-TV (and probably, if I had to guess, pushed by various IC infiltrators) spectacle. And we Americans are pretty worked up about that— the guy with the Nazi shirt and the guy with the Viking horns, and the guy with his feet on the desk. But for the most part, it was grannies and good ol’ boys registering their displeasure about an election because our electoral process itself is so opaque and untrustworthy that Americans no longer believe in _it_, either.
I detested Trump and the stupidity for which he stood, but I also understand why a lot of people have suspicions about our elections. We need handwritten, hand-counted, publicly counted paper ballots— such as a real democracy might have.
Meanwhile this “coup” has riled the libs and it’s just going to be an excuse for both parties to clamp down on “domestic terrorists” just as 9/11 was an excuse to clamp down on foreign ones.
I see this country slowly sinking into irrelevance. Not complete irrelevance, since we still have resources and big weapons. But relative irrelevance. The US is becoming the “Donald Trump of nations”— dumb and bloviating, consuming a lot, in love with itself, not realizing what everyone else in the world thinks of it, boldly taking advantage of its own people, bleeding them dry. The rich will eventually retreat to locked compounds with their servants and let everything else go to ruin.
And crime — well, I’m pretty sure crime is down because we’re completely surveilled, not because times are good or people are content.
I see mainly bad things ahead, because we’re on a downward spiral caused by inept and deeply corrupt leadership, and there’s no mechanism by which people, even if they get very angry, can make the US change course. The parasitic elite who are milking the system will continue to milk it, conditions will get worse, and even if the people get angry, they’ve only got their handguns, while the rulers have drones and bombs and tanks.
Lol “it doesn’t spread in lab animals.” Right. I’m sure you’ve got some links to share with me too, to support that claim?
WIV was part of a grant proposal in 2018 to add furin cleavage sites to bat coronaviruses using humanized mice. By late 2019, Wuhan (whose labs’ shoddy biosafety practices had already been discussed in State Department cables) was the origin of a really odd pandemic featuring a bat coronavirus with a furin cleavage site.
Such a coincidence. From the beginning, the people promoting the evidence-free zoonosis hypothesis are those with huge conflicts of interest. Another big coincidence. So I assume your comment is a joke.
So, when people write pessimistic stuff like this (and I see a ton from the left side in the NYT comments), I always have to ask: If you truly believe the future will be so terrible, why wouldn’t you kill yourself? Who would want to live in such a terrible setting?
So do you really believe in that? Remember that every person who has jumped off a bridge and managed to survive has, the instant they let go, had a sudden immense desire to live.
How ridiculous. There's nothing suicidal in my comment. Your take reminds me of the old-school retort: "Yeah? If you don't like it here in the good ol' US of A, why don't'cha leave?" Like that's some kind of checkmate. Naw man.
Thinking about it hard, I'd say that I'm in the techno-dystopia camp. I think the technology will pull through on climate, but not really start to register for another 20 years. My read on the consequences: we're in for like 60-80 years of *realllllly* bad times for the actually poor in the global south.
Those bad times will translate to into a lot of *significantly* destablized and failed polities there. Those failures will drive mass attempts at migration/refugee flight, which will push the rich in the developed world (and thus the governments) into extremely gross authoritarian behaviors and also result in things that we can't really wrap our brains around (like the heatwave deaths in "The Ministry for the Future" made real).
So, every*thing* will be amazing, but every*one* really, really, really, won't be.
I think things will be better than you think! Increasing incomes will probably cancel out a good chunk of the increased challenges from climate change. I'll do a post about what Bangladesh is doing to prepare. Yes, many people will suffer, especially from storms and floods, but I don't see mass state collapse.
Maybe! Certainly people are adaptable, especially to slow changes. It seems reasonable to think that rising wealth will likely move a lot of folks from more vulnerable levels, directionally offsetting the accumulation of climate impact pulling folks towards more vulnerable situations.
However, even a single state collapse can have really unhealthy impacts on the political health of the West! Look how badly the ordinary ~liberal order of much of Europe and North America has warped at least partially in response to refugeeism from the Syrian Civil War.
Just a handful of issues of that scale in a decade and it's very, very bad.
"As readers of this blog know, structural-demographic theorists distinguish between two causes of revolutions and civil wars: structural trends, which build slowly and are quite predictable, and much less predictable, or even unpredictable, triggering events. (...) Structural trends undermining social resilience in the United States have been building up for decades. It became clear to me 10 years ago (see my 2010 forecast at https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-science-behind-my-forecast-for-2020/) and has become obvious to most everybody in the last few years. These structural forces are: increasing popular immiseration (declining incomes, falling life expectancies, growing social pessimism and despair), elite overproduction and intra-elite conflict, and failing state (growing state debt and collapsing trust in state institutions). The Covid-19 pandemic put even more pressure on the system, especially exacerbating immiseration."
Right now I'm getting hope from the market price of renewable energy sources which seem to accelerating toward being able to replace a lot of carbon based sources. Also, the fact that the YIMBY's are starting to stand up to the NIMBY's. Dense city living is fun, great for your career, and much less energy intensive than rural and suburban living.
That is nonsense. They always say "renewables" but what they really mean is wind & solar, for which the costs of intermittency, geographic limitations, seasonal variability, high fossil based materials inputs, low EROI, large area requirements, major waste problem, short lifespan all mean they are not viable replacements for fossil fuels. In fact after spending over $4 trillion on wind & solar worldwide, mostly in the past decade, which has resulted in zero reduction in our 85% fossil fuel energy supply. Linear analysis of European wind & solar grid penetration shows wind + solar is 6X more expensive than traditional electricity sources:
European Wind Plus Solar Cost 6 Times Other Electrical Sources :
All quite reasonable, but you overlook to possibilities. The first is a conventional war in Eastern Europe. The second is a Trumpist victory in November and then Trump returning to the WH in 24 through something like what Eastman advocated. I don't think the war is likely, but surely Trumpist victories are, and the consequences they bring are unfathomable.
Always entertaining to see how socialists think climate change is adequate justification for upending the global economy and governance, but not enough to build nuclear power plants.
Heh. Yup.
you don't get the latter without the former.
That’s assuming that America has the capacity to build anything, which seems increasingly implausible
What do you do with the Nuclear waste?, and how long is it Dangerous?
I understand why Europe and North America has to get its house in order, and I share your optimism that we can do it. But, as you note, the real problem now lies in Asia, especially China and India. With those countries committing to carbon neutrality in the 2050s to 2070s, and with the regular addition of new coal-fired electricity generators, how can we do enough to offset what they are doing? How can we convince them to speed up decarbonization? Especially when we are at logger-heads with China.
This is something I don't understand about the proponents of socialism here. How will their proposals help with China and India, and hence, how are they a solution to anything?
The more optimistic was is through technology improvements, as also noted by Noah. If we can break through and make non-carbon generation cheap enough, Asian countries will want to decarbonize. And if we can master techniques to remove carbon from the atmosphere cheaply enough, we can contribute to global solutions, not just national or regional ones.
And yet, many progressives remain deeply suspicious of any technology-based attempts at solutions. I'm afraid that they still haven't taken climate change seriously.
Pretty much. Some smart leftists (and others) have realized that any solution predicated on social change or people going against their short-term self-interest just isn’t going to happen (short of extremely violent and unpleasant events like a world war or French/Russian/Chinese revolution). So yeah, we pretty much have to bank on technology (shooting sulfur in to the sky, etc.). But a lot of “leftists” (and on the right too) are really performative cosplayists. They’re not actually as interested in solving the world’s problems as much as working out their own personal issues in public. And that too is understandable with the modern world we live in. Humans intrinsically desire agency and if this neoliberal world doesn’t provide them with enough, they’ll get it through cosplay.
I know people who are firmly committed to the apocalyptic view (things will either get dramatically worse or dramatically better) and I'm convinced it's a question of psychology in which the facts are mostly irrelevant. Some people just have doomy personalities and whatever happens in the outside world gets refracted through that. Social media probably makes it worse since they now talk primarily to each other, not to a random selection of people in meatspace.
Articles like Noah's are useful for people who aren't quite that badly off, and want to see factual evidence when they try to decide whether the world is getting better, getting worse, or something more ambiguous. But the real doomsayers won't even process something like this piece.
And that's OK! 😊
I think an interesting question is actually around social media and the ‘meta verse’ and how much of our feeling of unrest is tied into new and unprecedented forms of communication. How much has this just accelerated trends that would have already happened and how much is it a true historical turning point? For example, how much should we fear the ‘time of disinformation’?
That's a damn good question. I need to interview Renee DiResta about this one of these days!
Please do!
Being old enough to remember the 80s gives me a different perspective. In the 80s the big concern was global warming (it was global cooling in the 70s) ending the world by 2000, only way to prevent it was to go solar (nuclear was too dangerous) - I still remember middle school teachers giving us art and craft assignments about how we will deal with all this when the world is underwater.
Time has taught me that these apocalyptic visions are largely the result of the neurotic LCDs in society who need to constantly rationalize their anxiety.
Humanity has survived for billions of years, we have never had it better. What matters now (as always) is to use technology to mitigate risks on the horizon - e.g., Dutch dike technology to perimeter key coastal areas at risk of flooding from climate change in the next hundred or so years, go all-in on nuclear energy etc. - not constantly indulge the neurotics in their delusions.
I think that while this is true, the scale and scope of the effort required to decarbonize our economies entirely in the next half century shouldn't be underestimated! Sure, the doomsayers are neurotic, but we have a lot of work to do!
I'm optimistic about the future, too, but you overestimate humanities' duration by a factor of about 10,000. Humanity has existed for 300,000 years, not "billions." Not to mention agriculture has only been around for 12,000 years. As far as the existence of earth goes, human societies are the new hotness, and it's not inconceivable that they could burn themselves out in relatively short order!
Of course, I was using "humanity" loosely, including our primate ancestors from which we branched off 6-8 million years ago, and even older tree and water based life forms.
Key point is that climate change is a threat that is best dealt by technological solutions, not neurotic activism that has created this post-Christian apocalyptic religion out of it, and that keeps pushing the doomsday date every decade or so.
We need more Elon Musks, and Boyan Slats, not Greta Thurnbergs.
"In the 80s the big concern was global warming (it was global cooling in the 70s)"
I have many books about environmental issues written in the 70s and the main problem that they talk was about global warming created by CO2; the idea that in the 70s the big concern was global cooling seems a bit of historical revisionism, plus some cherry-picking.
Taking the opportunity to do my usual recommendation to read The Wizard and The Prophet by Charles Mann...
Also, well done Noah! My lifetime spans a large proportion of the era you survey here. I was a young child in the 70s, but growing up in the Detroit area the combination of Cold War stress, segregation-related tension, industrial pollution, and economic doldrums (plus tornado drills!) was palpable even to kids. My father worked in the auto industry, and the conventional wisdom was that US cars were s*** and the Japanese were kicking our butts and would do so forever.
At some point during the 80s I realized that, huh, things weren't so bad anymore. During the 90s, I recall reading a dead-tree newspaper column by somebody like Charles Krauthammer marvelling at the amazingly quiescent state of the world (End of History and all that) and thinking, well, it's not THAT great! I can't remember what my younger self took umbrage at, but looking back, wow, spot on.
There was no epiphany about the ebb and flow of progress, despair, and muddling through. It has always taken me a while to understand that we have collectively taken a few steps forward. But it's been a consistent theme. Even now, when you choose to dig into a lot of these issues (I was able to do so during a research fellowship last year), you will often see little rays of hope. It's easier for me to stay open to this when I stay away from most media, mass and social. .
Yeah, the media's tendency toward negativity and the Availability Heuristic really exaggerate how awful everything seems!
I find this article really funny given that there is an extreme likelihood of a Republican wave in this year's elections. The only question now is how large.
I agree that such a wave is likely. But why does that make the article funny?
Many reasons, including:
1) The Red Wave *is* the radical change. There is a possibility of a multi-decade or even 100 year historic change in Congressional representation.
2) If there is a Red Wave, I believe we can agree that the US isn't going to do squat on climate change. Not that it has, really, anyway. Point being, no radical change in this area for sure.
3) The supposition: socialism or barbarism - related to 1), maybe the real question is conservatism or economic calamity (the traditional Republican condemnation of socialism).
Note that I believe that the most likely outcome of a 2022 Red Wave is an extension of the dinosaurian wing of the Republican party; the lack of need to run real candidates standing for real issues means the GOP is going to run even more of the oligarchic boot lickers than normal - but this isn't any different than the Democrats running against Trump.
The problem is - Biden clearly doesn't have the energetic (or rabid, depending on your POV) base of Trump.
I think Republicans are somewhat captured by fossil fuel interests, but even they are able to see the brute economic logic of costss.
Really Good Article! The same is here in Europe. Not as divided as the US but everywhere the mood that everything is getting worse...
So let`s see for example my Home Country Italy! There where the so called " Anni di Piombo" = Years of Lead... In this Years from 1969 to 1983 extremist Groups realized more than 14.000 attacks in Italy... Attacks from the far Left (Brigate Rosse) and much more the far Right... Overall this Attacks killed 374 people and wounded over 1170.
And now people are talking that everything ist worse than previous decades... It`s crazy...
Here is the Englisch Wikipedia Artikel for some quick Infos:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_Lead_(Italy)
I fucking love that song...
Very well done
I actually think the performative rage of social media helps to prevent actual rage on the streets. Much in the way video games kept teenagers off the streets and helped reduce street crime. If kids are awake at 2am now they are in the rooms gaming, not in the streets bored and looking for trouble. Social media, Twitter rage, what have you, makes people feel like they are doing something without having to mix up any kitchen sink Semtex.
Re “America’s great strength is that we freak out about everything, thus bestirring ourselves to early action when other countries might have let problems fester too long. If all goes well, 20 years from now we’ll look back on the 2020s as when society started to become sane again and we started to rebuild after a decade of chaos and rage.”
I wish I could believe that were possible. It would be nice “if all goes well” and society started to become sane again —and I know you’re saying it could go either way — but I don’t share any of the optimism. None.
We’re up to our eyeballs in an uncontrolled pandemic which was most likely caused by a lab leak followed by a clumsy coverup— which (while a few are speculating about it) essentially no one is doing a thing about. We’re not talking about biosafety. We’re not talking about international oversight of viral research. We’re not discussing the type of really useless research that creates super-viruses supposedly for benevolent purposes.
These viruses can be made for a few hundred bucks, with the skills of a grad student. Sure, I remember the 80s, thinking the world might end in a nuclear armageddon, but these viruses, and accidents, are way more dangerous. Almost incalculably more so. There’s no one to exercise the equivalent restraint with a virus, to hold the equivalent of the nuclear football. We don’t need multiple people entering their codes before disaster is unleashed. We just need some sloppy lab workers and a slightly worse virus, and here we go again. Life as we know it could be over next time. That’s how important this is, and that’s how stupid we are being.
I don’t necessarily think it’s true that we Americans freak out early about things, really. We freak out about the wrong things, like the “coup” that really wasn’t a serious threat. It wasn’t even “almost a coup.” It was kind of a joke. A dangerous joke to be sure, enabled by the Capitol police opening the gates as it it was a party, but a joke.
Meanwhile: We’re a wealthy nation, but one of the last in the world to provide health care to our people. A pandemic killing a million of us hasn’t even bumped that up the agenda to be a serious topic of discussion. We are _never_ getting health care for all, if the short-sighted oligarchs have anything to say about it.
It’s not an early freakout, or a late freakout. It’s business as usual.
We’ve nudged our political system more and more toward one that rewards only stupid/shallow/compliant legislators voting how they’re told to vote on pre-written legislation created by special interests which they don’t bother to read, such that in a real crisis, ****we don’t even have anyone capable of responding****. Our last two presidents have been a narcissistic dimwitted buffoon and a literal dotard. Things are so bad that people like Amash and Gabbard — who actually wanted to serve the American people— simply gave up and left.
That “coup” was some made-for-TV (and probably, if I had to guess, pushed by various IC infiltrators) spectacle. And we Americans are pretty worked up about that— the guy with the Nazi shirt and the guy with the Viking horns, and the guy with his feet on the desk. But for the most part, it was grannies and good ol’ boys registering their displeasure about an election because our electoral process itself is so opaque and untrustworthy that Americans no longer believe in _it_, either.
I detested Trump and the stupidity for which he stood, but I also understand why a lot of people have suspicions about our elections. We need handwritten, hand-counted, publicly counted paper ballots— such as a real democracy might have.
Meanwhile this “coup” has riled the libs and it’s just going to be an excuse for both parties to clamp down on “domestic terrorists” just as 9/11 was an excuse to clamp down on foreign ones.
I see this country slowly sinking into irrelevance. Not complete irrelevance, since we still have resources and big weapons. But relative irrelevance. The US is becoming the “Donald Trump of nations”— dumb and bloviating, consuming a lot, in love with itself, not realizing what everyone else in the world thinks of it, boldly taking advantage of its own people, bleeding them dry. The rich will eventually retreat to locked compounds with their servants and let everything else go to ruin.
And crime — well, I’m pretty sure crime is down because we’re completely surveilled, not because times are good or people are content.
I see mainly bad things ahead, because we’re on a downward spiral caused by inept and deeply corrupt leadership, and there’s no mechanism by which people, even if they get very angry, can make the US change course. The parasitic elite who are milking the system will continue to milk it, conditions will get worse, and even if the people get angry, they’ve only got their handguns, while the rulers have drones and bombs and tanks.
It’s not looking too good.
You seem to enjoy believing things because it sounds cool, but there’s no reason to believe covid is a lab leak when it doesn’t spread in lab animals.
Lol “it doesn’t spread in lab animals.” Right. I’m sure you’ve got some links to share with me too, to support that claim?
WIV was part of a grant proposal in 2018 to add furin cleavage sites to bat coronaviruses using humanized mice. By late 2019, Wuhan (whose labs’ shoddy biosafety practices had already been discussed in State Department cables) was the origin of a really odd pandemic featuring a bat coronavirus with a furin cleavage site.
Such a coincidence. From the beginning, the people promoting the evidence-free zoonosis hypothesis are those with huge conflicts of interest. Another big coincidence. So I assume your comment is a joke.
So, when people write pessimistic stuff like this (and I see a ton from the left side in the NYT comments), I always have to ask: If you truly believe the future will be so terrible, why wouldn’t you kill yourself? Who would want to live in such a terrible setting?
So do you really believe in that? Remember that every person who has jumped off a bridge and managed to survive has, the instant they let go, had a sudden immense desire to live.
How ridiculous. There's nothing suicidal in my comment. Your take reminds me of the old-school retort: "Yeah? If you don't like it here in the good ol' US of A, why don't'cha leave?" Like that's some kind of checkmate. Naw man.
But why not?
If the future is so bad, why would you want to live in it?
And yes, if you truly believe the US is awful, more than any other place on earth, why wouldn’t you leave?
Silly.
Thinking about it hard, I'd say that I'm in the techno-dystopia camp. I think the technology will pull through on climate, but not really start to register for another 20 years. My read on the consequences: we're in for like 60-80 years of *realllllly* bad times for the actually poor in the global south.
Those bad times will translate to into a lot of *significantly* destablized and failed polities there. Those failures will drive mass attempts at migration/refugee flight, which will push the rich in the developed world (and thus the governments) into extremely gross authoritarian behaviors and also result in things that we can't really wrap our brains around (like the heatwave deaths in "The Ministry for the Future" made real).
So, every*thing* will be amazing, but every*one* really, really, really, won't be.
I think things will be better than you think! Increasing incomes will probably cancel out a good chunk of the increased challenges from climate change. I'll do a post about what Bangladesh is doing to prepare. Yes, many people will suffer, especially from storms and floods, but I don't see mass state collapse.
Maybe! Certainly people are adaptable, especially to slow changes. It seems reasonable to think that rising wealth will likely move a lot of folks from more vulnerable levels, directionally offsetting the accumulation of climate impact pulling folks towards more vulnerable situations.
However, even a single state collapse can have really unhealthy impacts on the political health of the West! Look how badly the ordinary ~liberal order of much of Europe and North America has warped at least partially in response to refugeeism from the Syrian Civil War.
Just a handful of issues of that scale in a decade and it's very, very bad.
Says historian Peter Turchin at https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/america-in-november-2020-a-structural-demographic-view-from-alpha-centauri/
"As readers of this blog know, structural-demographic theorists distinguish between two causes of revolutions and civil wars: structural trends, which build slowly and are quite predictable, and much less predictable, or even unpredictable, triggering events. (...) Structural trends undermining social resilience in the United States have been building up for decades. It became clear to me 10 years ago (see my 2010 forecast at https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-science-behind-my-forecast-for-2020/) and has become obvious to most everybody in the last few years. These structural forces are: increasing popular immiseration (declining incomes, falling life expectancies, growing social pessimism and despair), elite overproduction and intra-elite conflict, and failing state (growing state debt and collapsing trust in state institutions). The Covid-19 pandemic put even more pressure on the system, especially exacerbating immiseration."
Also look for the graphs at https://peterturchin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/MPF2019.pdf
Right now I'm getting hope from the market price of renewable energy sources which seem to accelerating toward being able to replace a lot of carbon based sources. Also, the fact that the YIMBY's are starting to stand up to the NIMBY's. Dense city living is fun, great for your career, and much less energy intensive than rural and suburban living.
That is nonsense. They always say "renewables" but what they really mean is wind & solar, for which the costs of intermittency, geographic limitations, seasonal variability, high fossil based materials inputs, low EROI, large area requirements, major waste problem, short lifespan all mean they are not viable replacements for fossil fuels. In fact after spending over $4 trillion on wind & solar worldwide, mostly in the past decade, which has resulted in zero reduction in our 85% fossil fuel energy supply. Linear analysis of European wind & solar grid penetration shows wind + solar is 6X more expensive than traditional electricity sources:
European Wind Plus Solar Cost 6 Times Other Electrical Sources :
https://friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=2550
All quite reasonable, but you overlook to possibilities. The first is a conventional war in Eastern Europe. The second is a Trumpist victory in November and then Trump returning to the WH in 24 through something like what Eastman advocated. I don't think the war is likely, but surely Trumpist victories are, and the consequences they bring are unfathomable.
Oh I think these are very possible scenarios!