This Is the Beginning of the Age of...Extinction

[Brenda]

I really like umair's writings.

https://medium.com/eudaimonia-co/this-is-the-beginning-of-the-age-of-extinction-7cb0e0185121

All this is just what it appears to be. Hello, the sky is orange. You can smell Canada burning from Fifth Avenue…from Washington DC. Of course your gut is screaming out in alarm. That’s the only part left of most people that works anymore. What do you do when a fire so big its effect stretch across half a continent is on your doorstep? Shrug. Or run, like the devil himself was on your tail? The gut versus the brain. What’s a brain worth, anymore, anyways? Does the average person even have one? If they do, how come…nobody cares…about….

~snip~

History is going to look back on the 2010s and 2020s as the Beginning of the Age of Extinction. Every year, things get more…sinister. That orange sky. It’s happened in Australia, over and over again, where they had a “Black Summer,” when the continent…burned. In San Francisco. Now in Manhattan. Meanwhile, over the last few years, the mega-scale impacts of climate change have arrived. A third of Pakistan — that’s a country of hundreds of millions of people — flooded, thanks to a mega-monsoon. Europe’s rivers are running dry, and every summer, its hotter parts burn. Let me simplify all that, because, well, you probably already know it. But do you really understand what’s happening here? Does anyone?

~snip~

We might notice that having altered their politics to meet this moment — this immensely historic moment, stretching across the sands of deep time — human beings were transforming their economies. They were phasing out fossil fuels, and beginning to learn how to make the basic things they depended on — from food to household goods to transport to buildings — in harm-free ways. Or at least ways that had a minimal cost on planetary functioning. Instead? LOL, like I said, we’re nowhere near any of that. Not only is phasing out fossil fuel not even on our planetary agenda, it isn’t because we still have literally no idea how to make any of the following without fossil fuels — food, water, glass, steel, cement, crops, everything that’s made from them, which is everything, period, from houses to offices to medicine to clothes.

more at link

[Think. Again.]

1. Great rant, but...

"...Not only is phasing out fossil fuel not even on our planetary agenda, it isn’t because we still have literally no idea how to make any of the following without fossil fuels — food, water, glass, steel, cement, crops, everything that’s made from them, which is everything, period, from houses to offices to medicine to clothes."

We actually DO know how to generate the energy needed to do all these things without fossil fuels. Yes, there will have to be adaptations along the way, and it would all be even better if we just learned how to do without unneccesary excess of everything.

The problem that no one wants to talk about is that we simply are NOT putting in the effort needed to make the transition.

We are the ones responsible for knowingly causing climate change, and we are the ones responsible for knowingly NOT doing anything about it.

Let's at least be honest with ourselves.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

2. Yeah, no, we actually don't know how

Not only that, it's likely impossible.

People vastly underestimate the portable chemical energy contained in 10's of millions years of sunlight striking the entire surface of Earth and a fraction of it being saved in an extractable liquid/gaseous form underground.

There is no replacement for this energy bounty, not with 8B people to sustain.

Not even close.

It's easy to claim it's all a conspiracy by Big Petroleum. And to some extent ... it is. But the physics of our existence don't really allow for an alternative. We needed to start like 50 years ago. It's too late now.

[Think. Again.]

4. well then I guess...

Humanity runs out when the oil runs out?

[Hugh_Lebowski]

5. Pretty much, yup.

[Think. Again.]

6. so 50 years, give or take...

You would think we would be having a 50 year party....

Figure 1 Energy reserves in billion tonnes of oil equivalent – Btoe [4]


From: Stanford University https://mahb.stanford.edu/library-item/fossil-fuels-run/

[Think. Again.]

9. Actually...

That would explain why anyone who would be 'in the know' about this doesn't really seem to give a shite other than to keep the masses somewhat placated.

[Random Boomer]

12. Caught between a rock and a hard place

A sustainable, eco-friendly world without oil can't sustain 8 billion people, quite possibly never, but most certainly not in the short-term. There is no way to painlessly dismantle modern life in a period of a few years.

We were already brewing climate trouble back when I was a child, and there were only 2.5 billion people then. Immediately stopping our oil-energy-dependency is essential for at least trying to avert cataclysmic climate change (no guarantee it will work), but doing so immediately would require walking away from a technological/agricultural/distribution infrastructure that can't be replaced immediately. This would result in widespread chaos and millions of deaths, not just the inconvenience of giving up plastic straws.

It's easy to hate on the oil companies, but we've all been sucking at the teat of modern technology. We love our cars, air-conditioners, computers, flights to a holiday destination, single-family houses, out-of-season food, and of course, children. We want government to wave a magic wand and fix things, to make the evil oil companies stop their drilling, as if this wouldn't immediately and catastrophically collapse our economy and our entire way of living.

There's no stop button. This wild ride will end when our infrastructure collapses, as it inevitably will, and when the human population collapses, which it inevitably will. That's the only way off, in the time remaining.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

13. We are in full agreement, well said (nt)

[Brenda]

14. Poor Oil Companies? Fuck no.

Life can survive without oil.

[Random Boomer]

26. Some life can survive, sure

But keep in mind that global population before the industrial revolution was well under one million people.

[Think. Again.]

15. Rather than just waiting...

Rather than just waiting for society to collapse in 50 years, wouldn't it be better to ramp up non-fossil fuel power generation as fast as possible while decreasing power waste (I read somewhere that 65% of electricity produced is considered unneccesary or wasted, think of huge shopping malls lit up all night with no one in them, etc, I'll try to find those citations) and adapting to even less use of "neccesary" power (I really don't need a digital clock on every appliance in my kitchen glowing 24 hours a day)

And yes, I agree that we have let our population expand to unsustainable numbers even WITH some magical endless supply of power.

[hatrack]

16. We'll keep doing what we do until we can't, and then we won't.

.

[anciano]

19. Exactly, thank you ....

"Whatever happens to the great systems of nature will also be what happens to us." --- Richard Preston

[Random Boomer]

25. That's the human story in a nutshell n/t

[Think. Again.]

17. Apparently...

Your position that it's impossible to supply 100% of our energy needs without fossil fuels seems to be up for debate:

https://phys.org/news/2018-05-percent-energy-renewable-sources.html

[Think. Again.]

18. And more recently...

From the Union of Concerned Scientists:

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/road-100-percent-renewables

[NickB79]

22. Fossil fuels are far more than energy in our world

They're plastics. They're fertilizer. They're pesticides. They're industrial chemicals. All these processes release carbon. Plastics alone are set to quadruple by 2050

https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/735848489/plastic-has-a-big-carbon-footprint-but-that-isnt-the-whole-story

All told, Muffett says, "emissions from plastics production and incineration could account to 56 gigatons of carbon between now and 2050." That's 56 billion tons, or almost 50 times the annual emissions of all of the coal power plants in the U.S. Another study, led by researcher Songwon Suh at the University of California, Santa Barbara, predicted even more emissions from plastic manufacturing and packaging than CIEL's report did.

And a 100% renewable energy planet would still have a land use issue. A sizeable chunk of our carbon emissions come from agriculture destroying forests, forests being logged, and plowing liberating carbon from soil. Approximately 20% of our current emissions come from this. A lot of this is our desire for meat, especially beef, which is rising globally with no sign of stopping. As nation's become more wealthy, they invariably eat more meat.

So, even in a 100% renewable energy world, we have an extinction event. We'll keep dumping plastic into the ocean, keep catching the last fish for food, keep spraying farmland with pesticides, and keep clearing rainforest for beef cattle

[Random Boomer]

24. Just how long do you think this will take?

Completely transforming the energy infrastructure of the world, as well as all agriculture and industry and distribution systems, is not technically feasible in the near future. The planning alone would take decades, even assuming there was complete buy in from major countries and we had the labor and resources to remake the world, which we don't. Even under the best of circumstances, the transition would take centuries. Collapse will overtake us before then.

[Kaleva]

23. +1

[Duppers]

21. Hell yes!!

"We are the ones responsible for knowingly causing climate change, and we are the ones responsible for knowingly NOT doing anything about it."

TY!

[keithbvadu2]

3. The end is near?

[appalachiablue]

7. Great toons, Pizza Rat and building the pyramids, scary funny.

[Brenda]

8. Kinda funny

And as much as I HATE the LLM's being unleashed...it is humans, extremely wealthy humans and religious leaders who have lied and controlled millions of people for us to get to this place.

[appalachiablue]

10. A bit of gallows humor and levity in view of the painful reality. Yes greedy, powermad humans

are responsible for the destruction and hell ahead. Thanks for posting, I appreciate Umair Haque's excellent articles.

[Brenda]

11. He's so good with words

He says things in a way we all understand, no matter who we are. If we're human we can understand his story.

[Duppers]

20. K & R x 1000