Everywhere I look I see predictions of collapse
Given that, to anyone who’s paying attention, the society we once lived in is about halfway gone, I certainly don’t dispute them.
Reading Guardian, reading Substack, reading anything anywhere, I feel like I’m in a car heading 100 miles an hour for a cliff, and all I see from my fellow travelers is predictions that we’re going to go off it.
Nobody suggests we take our foot off the gas.
If the topic of taking our foot off the gas comes up, most of the passengers will agree that taking our foot off the gas would have undesirable outcomes and we can’t.
And because we all agree that we can’t, we can’t discuss it.
What are the odds that going off the cliff is going to have undesirable outcomes? What are the odds that taking our foot off the gas will have worse outcomes than not taking our foot off the gas?
And if we all agree that the only valid choice is to keep our foot down, push it down farther every day, then - does anybody have a beer? Lets sing a song. For Chrissake, I can see the fucking cliff. Why should I pay somebody to tell me every day that we’re heading for it faster and faster. Yeah. I got that.
It’s kind of like getting old. Every day I’m older. I’m going to die of it. I don’t need somebody to write me detailed essays on my limp, my sore knees, my shortening breath. And, at least where getting old is concerned, there is no cure.
But even while getting old, I focus on what to do about it. I walk, I work, I write, I think, I make music, I plant trees. I do everything in my power to lengthen my days of usable health. I take my foot off the gas. It’s the least I can do.
Allegedly developed, allegedly civilized, homo allegedly Sapiens does none of the above. We’re building data centers. We’re building dams. We’re building highways.
We play this marvelous game where we pretend that the things we use fossil fuels to do don’t cause us to burn fossil fuels. We pretend that we can do all the same things without burning fossil fuels. We tell each other pretty lies about transition.
It is absolutely a fact that we have vastly more fossil fuel generators, fossil powered mines, fossil powered cars and trucks, fossil powered highway projects, more more more more to “transition” away from than we had twenty years ago.
I’m an old man. I remember before the Interstate Highway System was built. I remember when my dad took the bus to work and my mom walked. I remember when, no matter where you lived in any city, you could buy groceries within two or three blocks from home, hardware the same distance, medicines, clothing, everything we needed. There is no benefit to humans to have all the necessities of our lives in big box stores twenty miles away, surrounded by fifty acre parking lots.
There is no reason for a society surrounded by floods and fires, hurricanes and droughts, blazing heat waves killing off the old and the infirm, to ever build another highway. There is no reason to build another airport. There is no reason to even keep building cars. We don’t need mass transit to get us to the store, we need the store within walking distance.
The state of New York just increased their statewide highway speed limit.
Everybody knows that this will burn more gasoline. It can’t not burn more gasoline. Do we care?
No. We don’t care.
I don’t know what we find so fascinating about collapse chronicles, collapse predictions, collapse evidence, creek valleys full of corpses, cities full of burned out shells of homes, but we obviously like it. We obviously prefer it.
Because we know what we burn fossil fuels to do. We burn fossil fuels to make things, ship things, make concrete, bulldoze, mine, build rocket ships, launch satellites, and - we don’t care. As a society we, and I speak here specifically of people who claim to believe in climate change, we emphatically would not give up any one new thing, any one new high tech toy, any larger airplane, any faster highway, to burn less of it today.
We’re all sure that we can burn more today and it will lead us to net zero tomorrow.
When I started recommending that we slow down, specifically do less, back in 2018, we were not burning anywhere near the amount of fossil fuel we’re burning today. We weren’t generating and consuming anywhere near the amount of electricity we’re burning today. We promised ourselves that we could Electrify Everything(tm) and magically use less fossil fuels. Turns out that we build Electric Everything(tm) with fossil fuels just like we always build everything else with them, so we’ve electrified our everloving asses off and, surprise, we’re burning more fossil fuels than ever.
I’m so sick of even talking about it.
Yes, dear, it’s collapsing. Thanks for reminding me.
I’d be for taking our foot off the gas, but I can see that nobody else wants to.
No kids in your life? Are you older than me and plan to be dead before it gets here? I’m older than yesterday and I’m not that confident anyway.
What else could we do? Besides slowing down?
We could write some articles about how grim it is. That’ll fix it.
I'm no longer chopping wood but I carry water most days. Did today. For animals.
I got it, too, because it coming during Reagan 1. So I write and take care of homeless animals, just like I was doing before things started collapsing.