On Drunks Flying Planes

REALgnd (Real Green New Deal Project) is a promising new organization with William Rees and Alice Friedemann, both people I respect, as directors.

Unlike most “green” organizations, they don’t deny reality and get straight to the key points that must be addressed: energy depletion and over population.

I suspect their call for a global one child policy is not aggressive enough to prevent a lot of suffering, but it’s a very good start.

https://www.realgnd.org/overview

Bursting the fantasy bubble about energy and sustainability…

We recognize that the climate crisis is but one symptom of our underlying overshoot crisis.​

Climate change, biodiversity loss, mass extinction, resource scarcity, ecosystem degradation – all are symptoms of one underlying problem: ecological overshoot. Too many people consuming and polluting too much, enabled by a one-off inheritance of abundant fossil energy.​

The laser focus on climate change neglects this systemic nature of the bigger problem. It would have us believe we can isolate and treat individual symptoms with technological fixes while ignoring the cancer causing them in the first place.

The only way to address the climate crisis is within the context of our overshoot crisis, which calls for a dramatic contraction of the human enterprise.

“It is intellectually dishonest to talk about saving the environment without stressing the obvious fact that stopping population growth is a necessary condition for sustainability.” – Dr. Albert Bartlett

“Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases which we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution, but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and the education of the billions who are victims.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. The more people there are, the less one individual matters.” – Isaac Asimov

“Once it was necessary that the people should multiply and be fruitful if the race was to survive. But now to preserve the race it is necessary that people hold back the power of propagation.” – Hellen Keller

“If we don’t halt population growth with justice and compassion, it will be done for us by nature, brutally and without pity – and will leave a ravaged world.” – Nobel Laureate Henry W. Kendall​

​​Humans have controlled population sizes since time immemorial. As sociologist Jack Parsons said, “population control is an ancient institution.” Even cornucopian economist Julian Simon said, “every tribe known to anthropologists, no matter how ‘primitive,’ has some effective social scheme for controlling the birth rate.”

Some of our oldest literary documents, the Babylonian “Atra Hasis” circa 1750 B.C. and the Philippine Code of Sumakwel from 1250 B.C., contain population control policies.

Confucius, Plato, the “first city planner” Hippodamus in Greece, the Indian sage Kautilya, the influential Catholic Church figure Tertullian, and even Benjamin Franklin, all spoke of the dangers of overpopulation and the need to manage our numbers – before Malthus ever entered the scene.​

Today’s population sizes – unprecedented in human history – have only been made possible by the unprecedented energy supply from fossil fuels. Two main factors drive the need to reduce our size: 1) the inability of a reduced future energy regime to support our current numbers, and 2) the destructive impact our bloated presence is having on the planet, its non-human inhabitants, and us.

Best estimated optimum global sizes of one to three billion indicate that populations virtually everywhere need to be reduced. Given our sheer size of eight billion, reductions will take a very long time. A global one-child policy enacted by around 2045 would get us down to roughly 3.5 billion by the end of the century. On the other hand, business as usual will leave us with over 10 billion people by 2100. Our recommendations are made in light of this daunting reality and out of a commitment to reduce suffering.​

Enact a national one-child policy, encouraging the global community to do the same

Make all forms of birth control (including those for men) free, and in the case of non-surgical forms, available over the counter

Make abortion free and widely available

Pay women/couples a significant financial incentive to have one child or none

Educate children and adults alike about the harmful impacts of overpopulation and its central role in our overshoot crisis, shifting from a human-centric view of the world to an inclusive view that honors and respects all life

Replace the taboo surrounding population with a moral imperative to make it a front-and-center social topic

Given our moral responsibility for global restitution, provide financial assistance to countries who seek it in order to help enact similar policies

Interesting new BBC series on energy production.

The denial theme here is that you will see copious quantities of diesel and kerosene burned in every episode, but there is no episode on the future of liquid fuels.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000lxp1/episodes/guide

Powering Britain

Series looking at the different sources of energy powering England, and the people who work in the industry.

Part 1: Wind
In the first episode, Wind, Keeley is trained to escape from a ditched helicopter before she heads 75 miles off the Yorkshire coast to see the building of the world’s biggest offshore windfarm. Hornsea One has broken every record for its size and scale, with 10,000 people involved in its construction in the North Sea. Keeley meets the staffs who’ve made it happen – but can she get to the top of one of the 174 turbines in the field?

Part 2: Biomass
Keeley Donovan takes a behind-the-scenes look at Drax near Selby, which is Britain’s biggest power station. She follows engineers as they undertake a £50 million maintenance programme that will see them move equipment weighing 300 tonnes. There are also giant boilers and turbines to refurbish as they get one of their six generating units reconnected to the National Grid.

Part 3: Gas
Keeley Donovan meets the people working in the gas industry in and around the Cumbrian Coast. She travels by helicopter to the Morecambe gas field as engineers find new ways of extracting the remaining fuel supply that’s been exploited for more than 35 years. Keeley also heads for the Barrow Gas Terminal where a complex network of pipes sends the gas to our homes.

Part 4: Nuclear
Keeley meets the people working at Britain’s biggest operational nuclear site at Heysham on the Lancashire coast. Heysham 1 and Heysham 2 power stations make enough electricity to power more than four million homes. Keeley follows engineers as they undertake a huge maintenance programme called an outage. But with Britain in lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, will engineers be able to get one of the reactors back on line to provide much-needed energy to the nation?

Better quality rips than these YouTube caps are available at the usual places.

In 1965 he sold out with an electric guitar, today he sold out for $300 million.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Dylan_controversy

Samples of the moon are on their way back to China.

Mars colonization can’t be far away. 🙂

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/07/weather/november-2020-hottest-month-climate-intl/index.html

The world just experienced its hottest November on record while Europe had its warmest fall, according to an alarming report from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Temperatures were most elevated in a large region across northern Europe, Siberia and the Arctic Ocean, where sea ice was at the second lowest level ever seen in November.

h/t Panopticon

I’m always looking for people who explain the economy and our money system from a different perspective. I recently found this guy and I like him, although I often don’t understand him.

Today he shows that none of the economic data makes any sense, which suggests something is broken in the system.

There’s so much deflationary pressure in the system that even a massively weakening dollar is not enough to raise the price of oil and gold. Yet despite this, everyone is massively bulled up on risk assets and cannot see what’s right in front of them.

Of course readers of un-denial know we’ve hit limits to growth in a system that requires growth. But this guy, not being a Themist, doesn’t know this, or more likely, denies this.

In any case, he provides an interesting viewpoint.

Another Themist gives up and goes dark. This time it’s Post Peak Medicine.

https://postpeakmedicine.wordpress.com/2020/12/03/the-end-of-an-era/

The End of an Era

With the Winter Solstice approaching, it’s that time of year when we look to the past and the future, review our successes and failures during the old year and try to predict what the New Year might bring.

I’d like to start off with an announcement: this will be my last post on this blog as I am planning to shut down this blog and the accompanying Post Peak Medicine website early in the New Year. To explain why I am doing this and to put it into context, I would like to take you on a super-fast tour through the 300,000 year history of our species, compressed into about 10 minutes.

Our species – Homo sapiens – evolved about 300,000 years ago, and until about 10,000 years ago we lived a roaming, hunter-gatherer life. We occupied a place at or near the top of the food chain and coexisted with a great many other species without threatening their existence or the integrity of our shared habitat.

About 10,000 years ago the first human civilisations emerged, based on sedentary agriculture and the domestication of plants and animals, initially in the Middle East between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in an area which corresponds to parts of modern day Iraq, Kuwait, Syria and Turkey. The first settlements were founded on the fertile lands bordering the rivers and were sustainable, but as the population grew and the area of cultivated land increased, it became necessary to develop irrigation channels to bring water to the drier land further away from the rivers. This proved to be unsustainable as the soil became increasingly saline and the settlements in those areas declined – probably the earliest example of the diminishing returns of technology.

Over the next 10,000 years, as numerous civilisations and empires rose and fell, the human population of the planet gradually increased and our effect on local ecosystems became increasingly noticeable. For example, large areas and sometimes whole countries were deforested in order to create more arable and grazing land to feed the growing human population – the United Kingdom being a case in point. Some civilisations collapsed through over-population and severe environmental degradation, for example, those of the Mayans and Easter Islanders. Nevertheless, these failures were the exception rather than the rule. Most human civilizations continued to exist sustainably, to coexist with other species and not permanently damage the carrying capacity of the environment.

The next major turning point for human civilisation came in the mid-18th century with the exploitation of fossil fuels, starting with coal in Britain, to power new inventions such as the steam engine, spinning and weaving machinery and new iron and steel manufacturing processes. The Industrial Revolution improved the quality of life for most people who participated in it, and made a few industrialists fabulously wealthy, but it was unsustainable from the start. The earth only has a finite amount of fossil fuel, and once it has been burnt and released its energy, it can never be re-burnt.

The world’s human population at the start of the Industrial Revolution was about 1 billion. With increasing quality of life, better sanitation and more efficient food production, the population increased to around 2 billion in 1930, 4 billion in 1974, 6 billion in 1999 and 7.8 billion today. It has more than doubled during my lifetime. Not only is this rate of increase unsustainable, but it is unsustainable for the numbers to continue at the current level even without any further increase. Most of today’s population is fed by the burning of fossil fuels and depletion of topsoil, minerals, fresh water and fish in the ocean, all of which are non-replaceable within any realistic timeframe. When these finally go away we will find out what the carrying capacity of the planet really is, and my guess is that it’s probably less than the one billion people who lived at the start of the Industrial Revolution when fossil fuels, topsoil, fresh water and fish were abundant.

The people who were around at the start of the Industrial Revolution couldn’t possibly have known that they were setting human civilisation on an unsustainable course. They had no way of knowing that burning coal in Britain would eventually lead to global warming, the melting of the polar ice caps, sea level rise, 10,000 mile long fossil fuel powered food supply chains and the death of the Great Barrier Reef – how could they? However, increasing numbers of warning lights have been flickering on our civilisation’s dashboard since the 1950s. These include M King Hubbert’s warning about peak oil (1956), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), the Limits to Growth report (1972), the 1970s oil crises (1973 and 1979), the beginning of the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef (1980), the collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery due to over-fishing (1992), the Great Financial Crisis (2008) and increasingly strident warnings about climate change and species extinction – including possibly our own. Most of these warnings have been ignored, or at least, not acted upon effectively.

I came onto this scene rather late. Born in 1959, I didn’t take much notice of most of the above, assuming, as most people did, that governments had it all in hand and knew what they were doing. In 2008 I became aware of the existence of peak oil and the impossibility of perpetual growth on a finite planet, and I decided to try to do something about it. I thought that perhaps if I wrote a book about how one might create a workable healthcare system in a post peak oil society, it might wake up and persuade some people. Hence, “Post Peak Medicine” (the book and website) were born in 2010 and have been online ever since. In the last ten years, to the best of my knowledge, they have woken up and persuaded precisely nobody, although a lot of people have read them who were probably thinking along those lines already.

Food, fresh water, energy, minerals, manufactured goods and humans are all going to decrease in quantity from now on until they reach a new equilibrium at a fraction of their current levels, which will probably be a few hundred years in the future. This is going to happen whether we like it or not, and whether we plan for it or not. Reality requires it, and is going to do it for us if we don’t do it for ourselves. Despite this, governments, economists, the mainstream media and the general public are still calling for more material, economic, energy and population growth, although there has been a shift towards the rhetoric of “green energy”, “green growth” and “sustainable growth” and much talk (although considerably less action) about the need to limit climate change.

Ten years is enough. If the world has ignored 60 years of warnings including 10 years from me, it is unlikely to start listening any time soon, I’m not planning to spend any more time or energy trying to persuade it, and I’m closing down the Post Peak Medicine book, website and blog. Instead, I’m directing my energy into learning how to grow food for myself and my family and developing my knowledge about toxic plants (see my previous post) in the hope of developing safe and effective plant-based anaesthetics which may be of some practical use to people in the future. I’ve set up a new website and blog at toxicplants.co.uk and toxicplantscouk.blogspot.com respectively, and I’ll continue to publish a blog quarterly, with the emphasis (as the name suggests) on toxic plants, and maybe a few edible plants as well. Please feel free to visit and comment!

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Or a good Winter Solstice if that’s your preference.

Slaynt vie, bea veayn, beeal fliugh as baase ayns Mannin

P.S. Themist is a much better name for doomers proposed by Gail Zawacki here:

http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2019/07/in-praise-of-themis.html

I always make time for Matt Taibbi.

Maybe this explains why Al Jazeera is my favorite source of news these days.

The five media behemoths who own more than 90% of all US media outlets (Comcast, Viacom, Disney, Time Warner, Newscorp) have discovered that its much more profitable to focus on discrete audience segments and give them the information they want to hear.

Which is why the former approach of “just the facts” reporting to a general audience has practically disappeared. There’s less money in it.