I've talked about the increasing complexity we face with recursive problems that produce chaotic conditions. This complexity results from traditional explanations of large-scale issues that are entangled beyond our broad levels of understanding.
This overwhelming complexity is no longer confined to academic circles. It's a pervasive issue that demands attention, even from those outside of university philosophy departments.
Is there anyone left in those philosophy departments except old post-structuralists and a younger group of logicians who live in a wholly digital world? We abandoned both philosophy and history, and now the shit is hitting the fan, and we don't know what to call it.
We are burdened with idiots, many of whom managed to earn a law degree but never went beyond legal exegesis as dictated by their political owners. The rest of the North American population is lined up to buy snake oil or has given up in disgust.
None of these conditions helps. The origin of democratic governance is the assumption that common knowledge is adequate to guide public policy. The original form in Athens 2,500 years ago failed when people preferred traditional mythology over logic. Socrates ended up having to drink poison for demeaning the Athenian divinities.
The modern American experiment gave only landowners the vote, thinking this represented common enough agricultural sense to guarantee success. But landowners ended up being another aristocracy, and the population became one of laborers and merchants.
Public education, as designed in Prussia to staff the army, was the solution for the United States. Unlike landowning farmers, workers were like an army that benefited best from regimentation and discipline.
All of that worked for a century or so under an unbalanced economic system that became committed only to capital acquisition. Market forces kept wealth circulating for several decades, but it was never stable.
The lack of stability and the growing corruption of a capitalist system built on ownership at all costs caused the educated population to question the bill. That meant the end of liberal education.
The new billionaire elite followed profit into permanent wars, which allowed endless growth. This was the only way to feed the capitalist monster that the billionaires themselves fed on. But then the planetary bills started coming due.
We are now facing a double whammy with the free lunch of fossil fuels running out and poisoning our atmosphere. Trying to push that off on our grandkids, thinking they would discover the magic answer, didn't work because the end is near.
With a civilization assuming endless fossil fuel power, growth of goods, and endless war to keep the profits rolling in, dire consequences were inevitable. Rather than sometime late this century, the problems are now already hitting us, and 2030, yes, seven years from now, looks very scary.
The double whammy is the climate disaster, disrupting our lives, societies, and health, and the rising costs of maintaining adequate fossil fuels. None of this is simple, and the layers of complexity on a planetary scale are far beyond our human tendency to be single-issue problem solvers.
What has triggered this change for the worse? First, we will look at the planetary issues from two integrated perspectives, although we do not usually hear them presented as combined. Then, I'll summarize what that means for the US (North America).
The first part and its references for detail are economic and asset-based. The second part is climate science-based. Please note that these references and what I summarize here in social terms are not the mainstream position you have seen since the 1970s.
There is a tremendous amount of knowledge about the conditions ending our world as we know it that has yet to be included in our official view of the total climate disaster. This is to avoid social and economic disruption that further disrupts our shaky planetary political situation.
The official timeline for climate disasters is based on the goal of reducing carbon emissions to zero by 2050, which is also the basis for national acknowledgment of the climate disaster. Many countries are taking no need to worry and action to meet this goal.
These goals include electric vehicles and the removal of coal and fossil fuels from electrical production. Politically, we hear about our successes and China's failures. The complexity of this transition over the next twenty-five years forces China to build more coal-fired power plants while they move to renewable resources.
What is not covered for North America is that China is already well ahead of the American world in converting to electric vehicles, while the US conversion has slowed. In the American corporate media, that discussion is about preventing Chinese EVs from being sold.
The two factors above are excellent examples of the problem of understanding how to integrate the solutions for our planetary problems. If reducing carbon emissions is our primary goal to prevent planetary disasters from warming, why is this being done?
The reasons are given in the US as economic and national security. The financial reasons are the loss of jobs if the more efficient Chinese EVs wipe out US car production and the Chinese control systems in those cars provide too much information about where people in the US are driving.
These are valid questions. But their validity is based on the timeline of climate disasters, which assumes EVs will significantly affect carbon in the atmosphere (they will have an impact, but not a primary one). This also assumes that there is time to work out an alternative to fossil fuel usage (the use of fossil fuels is far more extensive in industrial production and commercial transportation). These are now very wrong assumptions.
Our addiction to fossil fuels does not have a renewable alternative for our planetary economic system. We are past the peak of petroleum production from economically available resources, and fossil fuels will begin to disappear by 2030.
Here is one economic aspect of this explained:
The End of the Great Stagnation
Although GDP figures suggest otherwise, people of western (OECD) economies are in fact trapped in a great stagnation…thehonestsorcerer.medium.com
But of course, as they say in late-night TV commercials, that’s not all. We have the timing of the climate disaster very wrong. The models are based on the agreement accepting prolonged, slow climate change.
In summary, we are amid a stunning escalation of surface temperatures from last year. I’m not going to review the scientific details, but the official US position is to keep the old models and assume that the temperature changes now are, somehow, temporary.
There is an extensive scientific debate about whether to change the models on which we have built the hope of correction. This doesn’t seem right for so many reasons now, and those reasons are mounting by the month.
In summary, we will be at an increase of 2.0 degrees Celsius by 2035. Even though we are past that now, we are still officially attempting to keep the planet below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The official acceptance is an annual average that will happen by the end of the year.
As the temperature rises, it is interesting to see the media discuss how we will prevent a 1.5-degree increase that has already occurred. Unless you spend time and effort on climate science and the different positions, you would have no idea this has happened unofficially.
Here is the technical detail to start with:
The Crisis Report— 48
Let’s be CLEAR about what “Mainstream” Climate Science actually says. (Part Two)smokingtyger.medium.com
And a newer update:
Short Takes — 20
Do you want to see what a SUCCESSFUL Carbon Storage and Sequestration (CSS) solution looks like?smokingtyger.medium.com
We will see what happens at COP 29 in November.
Again, my positions are outside the official climate timeline. The scientific facts we now have almost certainly disprove the assumptions about the polar sensitivity of the official model. The official model is wrong, and we have no choice but to deal with reality. If it moderates, that would be great. The odds are plain that moderation is a very long shot.
What will we do as things worsen at the current rate? Pretending that the official models are accurate is not an answer. Where each nation should be looking now is how they will deal with imminent collapse in the next ten years.
In the US and, generally, in the American Empire, this discussion is limited to national military planning and is not open to public debate.
The world of American power is coming to an end. What are the indications of that? Increasingly, that is accepted as inevitable, but what does it mean, and when will it happen?
Many people refuse to admit this, including the people we have elected to manage our government. The growing range of public problems affecting us results from people needing to grasp the reality of our world.
As climate disasters increase, the number of political disruptions that result from an absence of leadership will steadily increase. Most people seem to agree that we need functioning political leadership at the national level, but that does not exist.
The escalating planetary climate and resource disaster are hidden under denial, obfuscation, political noise, criminal conspiracies, and growing stupidity. A significant part of the problem is that we are over our heads.
If we are to understand our problems, they require serious analysis. We have already failed by not attempting to educate ourselves.
There are too many layers and iterations of our disasters as hyperobjects. Should we give up? Many people have been working to understand our problems, but our only hope is to mitigate things as they evolve and to become very flexible in how we reorganize ourselves to do what needs to be done.
Here is another current discussion of these problems and the difficulty of finding answers anywhere in the American Empire. This does cover the pandemic, which is crippling us and is the beginning of the significant die-off that we are facing.
War, Covid And Narratives Of Control
I feel like reality is coming undone.substack.com
While the American election is already a contest between disaster and unmitigated disaster, Kamala Harris’s previous positions offer hope. The best hope is that she will be elected with the power to return to what she previously supported, and it may be enough to mitigate the disaster that cannot be stopped.
The question is how fast the great die-off will go. The best estimates are that we will lose 2–3 billion people in the next ten to fifteen years.
If we allow the uncontrolled genocide and Netanyahu’s push for nuclear war in the Middle East to drag the American Empire into it, then we may lose that many people in the next year or so.
How do we escape this? Ah, there’s the rub.
We must install AI advisors in all regional and planetary management positions. This is happening behind the scenes but needs to be made a public policy. Humans should advise AI systems that manage our civilizations and planet for maximum welfare and sustainability.
That is the only answer. We are not able to manage a planet and its biosphere, and if we try, we will all die.
Sorry.
I would be interested in reading a fuller discussion about your vision that only AI can lead humanity out of our predicament of climate disaster, global heating, civilizational collapse, over consumption and over population. How would this work politically?