The great anxiety gripping the planet is a polycrisis of many evolving disasters. The most fundamental issue is climate disaster, which will remove a significant portion of the planet's life forms over the next few decades.
While there are many things to worry about, the net result will be a planetary-level triage triggered by atmospheric temperature change. We are several decades into the sixth great extinction.
Reference: The Next Great Extinction Event (Spark).
The significant triage in life forms includes Homo sapiens. Current estimates indicate that the human population needs to be reduced to approximately four billion for sustainability. Our planet last had a sustainable population in 1970 at 3.9 billion people.
Most people deny or refuse to think about this great extinction event. Such a thing could not possibly happen. That does not change reality.
Geologic changes have produced significant changes in our planet's history. Except for the impact of the asteroid at the end of the Cretaceous, which killed most dinosaurs except those that became birds, these changes took several thousand years.
The sixth great extinction is happening with blinding speed, and it is the only one caused by one species, Homo sapiens. Many animal species are disappearing from the face of the Earth, and estimates indicate that about 150 animal species disappear every 24 hours.
Due to the impact of the Holocene extinction, almost 20% of flora and fauna could face extinction as early as 25 years from now. This estimate now seems conservative, just as the speed of climate change was grossly underestimated, as we are now seeing.
It is nearly impossible for people to accept this level of adverse change in their lifetime. The scope is too large.
Because of the incomprehensibility of the polycrisis, we experience great anxiety scattered over more minor interrelated disasters that are within our traditional scope. Unfortunately, finding an understandable scope for our disasters is harder each day. The more minor problems we identify seem impossible to solve as they are only partial aspects of the planetary polycrisis that we refuse to accept.
Normal human problem-solving is not possible in this situation. Complexity means we are not dealing with problems but predicaments. Effectively, predicaments only have outcomes and no individual solution.
That is why social and political disasters appear without solutions or rational explanations. Almost every social or political problem is entangled with planetary predicaments carrying decades or centuries of historical baggage that are now interlinked.
We cannot separate these problems because doing so destroys any chance of understanding them. To have any hope of mitigating our continuous array of large and small disasters, we must struggle to work at multiple levels and scales with which we have no experience.
To understand the collapse of the American political and economic system and its absurdities, we must examine the planetary level concurrently with the regional, national, and local levels. Our national media have no clue beyond the traditional scale of accepted economic measurements and the proverbial winner-take-all political horserace.
Those measurements and analogies are no longer relevant at most economic levels. The existing late-stage capitalist system works consistently only for the tiny billionaire class and only haltingly there, hence their demands for tax cuts. This results in constant declarations of the health and growth of the economy that ring false for most of the population.
At the same time, the capitalist system's requirements are endless growth at a constant rate. This is precisely what has caused and is worsening the climate disaster on one level, resource depletion on another, and growing precarity for the majority, with rising malnutrition and poverty.
These are not problems we can grow our way out of. But shrinking our total footprint is a forbidden topic. Yet, it takes little research to see that no other viable solution exists at the planetary scale, and smaller-scale solutions fail at the planetary level. Despite this constant talk of technical miracle solutions, none have proven not to worsen a bad situation and require action at a planetary scale.
Reference: The Crisis Report . . . Why is the sea so hot?
For example, that scale would require repurposing the wealthiest nation's military operations and pausing all current wars. And that moves us to another aspect of our 21st-century predicament.
America is a military empire dependent on continuous regional warfare to maintain the illusion of constant capitalist growth. This illusion is paper thin, but there is no alternative even under discussion except in the academic dream worlds of surviving EU democratic socialist states.
And those are under assault by fascist neo-populist groups desperate to loot wealth while there is still somewhere to spend it, although the people involved may not understand their motivations. The political layer of anxiety is the collapse of the American Empire. Ironically, that anxiety indicates that the Empire has already fallen.
Historically, worry about the fall of an empire occurs after the fall and during the period of disintegration.
That brings us to alternative futures in our immediate set of predicaments. To clarify, our immediate alternatives are only what we can control. Control over our big future is taken away by several centuries of institutionalized greed.
We know the outcome of our climate predicament: several decades of planetary triage that brings our population and social structures back into balance with our planetary resources. There is no alternative to this; it will happen either fast or slow, managed or unmanaged.
I vote for managed.
What alternatives do we have?
The Present Course
Reference: Meet The Gator: Growing Energy Demand
Yes, we have made progress on the electrification of cars, but not heavy equipment. We have moderately reduced the rate of carbon increase in the atmosphere, and select nation-states are making plans to improve it further, but only after a tremendous increase in fossil fuel production and use.
Under Biden's most extensive program, America is committed to infrastructureBiden'sement and improvement, but the military-industrial complex comes first. Wars are big business, and that is our only game.
Continuing the Biden trajectory, I have trouble calling it a program, and it is certainly not revolutionary and may hold the American Empire together until 2030. But that is dependent on:
The current sea temperature explosion being a temporary effect of El Nino and not permanent.
We get control of the neofascist cults. This is not just Trumpists but also those in the EU, Africa, India, and Turkey.
Israel is contained and punished, forced to fund the rebuild of the Palestinian state pieces. Gaza alone will consume billions and should keep the capitalist states occupied for years.
Serious international efforts are being made to reduce consumption, create planetary assets, and improve climate management.
Given some or all of the above, this is the managed decision. This won’t save us, but we may be able to manage the growing climate and food chain disasters to our maximum ability.
The Highway to Hell
If fascists and criminal reality deniers gain control, there will be little or no effort to manage the collapse. Greed and corruption will rule.
Will this make a lot of difference? Probably not. Things will be much worse for some parts of the population, and the hope for relief will be lost due to the absence of national medical management during the COVID-19 pandemic under Trump.
Despite the American media hysteria over Trump, most people are now becoming involved and are not deluded by the clown show.
As climate disasters grow, the US and probably other American Empire nation-states will begin disintegrating. Should the Trumpists be able to steal the 2024 election, that will happen quickly, I think.
Again, none of this will make much difference beyond the immediate future.
Less Likely Alternatives
With the current planetary reality, there is not much that we can do. Even a sudden international commitment to end fossil fuel use will have little impact on what needs to happen, as our population and resource use have been so out of line for decades.
The price must be paid. How much we can slow the rate of dying is the only question.
While a percentage of the human population will hold onto hope for a miracle, none are adequate in size to have much effect. This is a policrisis made up of hyperobjects that have no individual solution and is not solvable by something like the agricultural revolution of the mid-20th century that allowed us to support our overshoot population for a few decades.
We are all not going to die next Tuesday, next year, or the next century. Many people are already dying in the Middle East and elsewhere. There will be continuous and growing causes for population loss.
In America, there are more people dying due to the failure to provide universal medical care and adequate nutrition. We accept that as normal.
We will accept much higher death rates as normal and greater human suffering as normal with far greater insecurity. This will be terrible, but only for those of us who remember how it once was and what we hoped we could achieve.
However, suffering steals need to be reduced, and lives still need to be maintained. There is work to do, and it won’t be done by magic, myth, or religion.
I always appreciate your well-reasoned sobering perspective. And I must disagree on your use of the word religion. In my opinion mature religion is what we need more and more of and is often the motivator for those who act in crises as Camus character in the Plague. And most people wouldn't know mature religion if it bit them in the ass to paraphrase Frank Zappa
I wish I could disagree with any of your logic.