Only 5 Years Until Doomsday!
Global Civilizational Collapse by 2030
A year ago, my 2024 New Years resolution was to post mostly positive articles. I felt that enough information about ecological overshoot and catastrophic global climate change was out there already. Enough people were writing and talking about it, that there was no point in continuing to beat that drum myself.
As it turned out, I didn’t have much original thought to contribute in a positive vein. So I posted a lot of nostalgic music columns that made me feel happy, even if they didn’t get much uptake from you, my Medium readership. I’ve still got a bunch in my pipeline, so I’ll be putting out more of them.
Nevertheless, I want to start out 2025 with a reminder that civilization is faltering and that we will see major collapse by 2030. The data, which I will not bother to summarize, points to no other conclusion.
A lot of folks still think we (industrial civilization) will survive this challenging time using our amazing technological prowess and necessity being the mother of invention. Others see collapse coming but think we still have until 2050 or 2080 before it gets really disastrous. Even the brilliant Richard Crim is now looking at a 2035 to 2050 timeframe.
However, once I set my cap to think on 2030, I began to see that it is a very reasonable expectation. Things are already very bad, and getting worse at an accelerating rate. Five years is a long time for things to go downhill, a very long time at the rate things are deteriorating.
Nevertheless, even I feel the siren call of hopium. As of this moment, my hopium is that, while the world crashes, the USA will have some extra runway — at least for privileged, well-off white folk like myself. Our high and increasing domestic production of fossil fuels is the main reason I foresee this happening.
You see, I’m beginning to believe that the USA has not been slow to address climate change after all. I don’t think our powerful elites have really been in denial. I think the gravity of climate change has been quite clear to them for decades. We know the Department of Defense has been warning of it being a top national security issue for at least a decade.
No, it is not that they’ve been slow to address the issue. It’s simply that their response has not been along the lines of the losing game of trying to mitigate the problems. Rather, they have been readying the country to be the last man standing when it all goes to shit.
Nor has this been the response of only the USA. At the recent COP 29 meeting, we saw first world nations backing off on the concept of climate justice — their responsibility to help the global south and third world countries, those who are bearing the initial brunt of the climate change they had no part in creating.
How about Russia? I believe the war in Ukraine is primarily about Russia coveting Ukraine’s vast wheat fields in the face of impending global, climate-change-driven food shortages.
China with their Belt and Road initiative has been working since 2013 to secure food and other resources they will need in a climate-change future. As well as moving quickly to ramp up wind and solar power generation.
Perhaps even the Trump party’s immigration panic is most truly about putting up walls around fortress USA for when the global famines start, climate migration increases exponentially, and more regional resource wars break out — i.e, by 2030. (Not that Trump himself has any clue about any of it. Nor would he care.)
Here’s what I think. Industrial civilization, as we’ve become only too aware of in recent years, is built on fossil fuels. To preserve civilization within its borders, the USA has ramped up fossil fuel production in the face of fossil-fuel-driven global-warming gases being one of the main causes of the collapse of global industrial civilization. With plenty of fossil fuels, and great (if declining) food production resources, we will be able to maintain a semblance of our current lifestyle in the USA while the rest of the world crashes.
This analysis and my need for hopium leads me to hope that, while everything is going to shit by 2030, perhaps I will personally be able to lead a fairly comfortable life until maybe 2040. At least, as comfortable as I can be while my heart aches from watching the world die around me.
In fact, the upsurge in white nationalism may tie into it as well. As the resource pinch gets tighter, who shall have and who shall have not?
Oh shit. I’m a transsexual woman. I’ll probably be starving in a reeducation camp long before climate change gets to me.
