Global Climate Change is Only the Tip of the (melting) Iceberg
If we can solve climate change, we’ve barely just begun…
Do you know how fucked we are? It’s not just global climate change that is fucking us. Our fucked-up-ed-ness goes much, much deeper than that.
Yes, climate change is going to blow our civilisation apart. The signs are now in our faces and I don’t need to repeat them here. So I’ll let the U.N. repeat them:
In its annual state of the climate report [at COP27], the United Nations’ weather agency… highlighted the summer’s incredible flood in Pakistan that killed more than 1,700 people and displaced 7.9 million, a crippling four-year drought in East Africa that has more than 18 million hungry, the Yangtze River drying to its lowest level in August, and record heat-waves broiling people in Europe and China.
— Huffington Post
Climate change is the immediate problem. Be worried, be very worried. Now is the time to panic.
But the worst news is this: If we miraculously found an amalgam of technological solutions that stopped climate change dead in its tracks tomorrow; if we initiated a plan to build a million carbon-capture-and-storage plants to remove CO2 from the atmosphere over the next ten years, and that would re-stabilise the climate, civilisation is still doomed.
Global climate change is only the first tipping point of the overarching problem, which is resource usage overshoot due to overpopulation.
It is Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus’ prediction coming true with a vengeance. (Briefly, in 1798 Malthus pointed out that, since food production grows linearly and population grows exponentially, eventually there won’t be enough food to feed everybody.)
Follow me down into this deep, deep hole of fucked-up-ed-ness.
Even without global climate change, capitalism is killing us.
As Umair Haque explains so eloquently here, https://eand.co/this-isnt-late-stage-capitalism-anymore-now-it-s-end-stage-capitalism-873ff5f233ea, end-stage capitalism has made it our culture’s only goal to accumulate all the wealth into the hands of just a few super-duper-mega-rich fucks.
Do you know the story of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) paper-clip machine? Let me tell you. (See Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom.)
A man who owns a paper-clip factory invents an AI and instructs it to optimise the factory to produce the most paper-clips.
The AI gets the factory running wonderfully productively, but it realises its paper-clip production is being limited by the amount of metal that comes in the loading dock.
It increases metal deliveries every way it can and, after some time, it is using all the metal in the world to make paper-clips.
But still the AI wants to make more paper-clips so it learns how to manipulate atoms and molecules so it can turn all material on the planet into paper-clips.
Including us humans.
And the planet itself.
Eventually, all that is left in the universe is paper-clips.
You see, we’ve designed the capitalist system the same way. Its one and only goal is to produce profits, and it has gone way past the point where profits are meaningful. They are now just big piles of money in the hands of a few mega-capitalists and mega-corrupt billionaires (not mutually exlusive categories).
We’re almost to the point where the entire universe is one big pile of money, which is just worthless slips of paper because there is nothing left to purchase.
But even if we manage to rein in our capitalist system and convert the world to a utopian socialist democracy, as well as fixing climate change, we’re still all going to die because of industrial/technological progress.
What does all of our technology do? Somewhat like the paper-clip AI, it turns everything living into wonderful, useful, but inedible gadgets and other dead material goods. But humans, and every other creature on Earth, need living things to eat.
If technology continues on its trajectory, nothing living will be left to feed us, and so we will not exist either. Nothing will be left but robots. Possibly robots making paper-clips.
But even if we were to eliminate industry and technology and turn back into an agriculture society, as well as reining in capitalism and solving climate change, I’m sorry to tell you that civilisation still collapses. Because agriculture, the way we practice it, what Daniel Quinn calls “totalitarian agriculture”, turns nature’s rich biodiversity into poor, soil-depleting monocultures.
Soil depletion, which I won’t describe further because I don’t really understand it very well, was leading us to confront Malthus’s crisis at the beginning of the 20th century.
At the time, agriculture was being sustained mainly by guano-based fertiliser harvested from islands off the coast of Peru (and other places) and also phosphates from Banaba, an island in the central Pacific Ocean, but these sources were dwindling while farming was expanding.
Around 1910, the German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented the Haber–Bosch process which enabled synthetic nitrogen-based fertilisers and saved our bacon, as it were, substantially increasing farming yields. This technological breakthrough put Malthus back into his coffin again.
Synthetic fertilizaers and subsequent technological advances such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs) gave rise to the belief that technological solutions will always save us. But here we are, 100 years later, with Malthus rising once again from his grave as technology is failing us.
Even if we can push our agricultural system to support ten or twelve billion people, Malthus is not going away this time. Today even “Big agriculture warns farming must change or risk ‘destroying the planet’.”
But even if we reform our agricultural practices and implement only regenerative farming practices and permaculture, we still all starve to death before long because of resource consumption overshoot.
There are so many of us that we are consuming more of nature’s bounty every day than nature can regenerate. The ultimate source of our society’s deep, deep fucked-up-ed-ness is, ironically, that we fuck too much!
Sorry, I couldn’t resist writing that last line. However, fucking too much isn’t actually why our population has grown beyond the Earth’s carrying capacity. The real reason is what was discussed in previously: We are so good at agrgriculture that we continually produce more and more food.
Too much food! As all ecologists know, and as Daniel Quinn explains clearly in his philosophical novels Ishmael and The Story of B, the population size of any and all species tracks inevitably and inexorably with food supply: If the food supply increases, the population grows; if the food supply decreases, the population shrinks.
We think we’re growing more and more food to feed our growing population, but actually growing more and more food is causing our population growth.
The only way for humankind to survive, to survive for the long term that is, is to reduce our population to match the carrying capacity of our world. And we will never do that with the mindset of our current civilisation.
As long as we act like an earth-sized plague of locusts, consuming consuming consuming, we are doomed.
Consuming food.
Consuming energy.
Exhausting soil.
Mining for minerals, fossil fuels, lithium and other rare-earth metals.
Consuming not just to meet our needs, but to live in luxury and to accumulate wealth and power.
There must be other ways of living, ways that leave Gaia richer for our having been here rather than poorer. In fact, such ways of living successfully and sustainably do exist; pre-history proves it. But this civilisation must topple first.
Maybe we should all join the Pennsylvania Amish.
— Lannie Rose, November 2022
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
