In my recent post Are We Looking at the End? I quoted a few scientists who claim that human civilization will “unravel” somewhere between 2040 and 2050, due primarily to climate change and the loss of biodiversity, particularly the insects.

In response, longtime 2GreenEnergy supporter Cameron Atwood writes:

What we need is a global moonshot attitude toward transitioning, and that we don’t have.

We also need a buy-in by the most exorbitantly wealthy among us, the top 1%, and we don’t have that either.

Of course, the least powerful among us individually have little sway over the direction of the paradigm, and the most powerful are disinclined to alter their behavior.

Any advisors they listen to are dependent on their good graces and will wait until what they think is the last minute to advise change.

By then it will have been too late. It may already be now.

I don’t advise we give up, as potent action may still mitigate the worst of the consequences, and at least we will have tried.

Excellent points.  This civilization has no paradigm of cooperative action to promote its survival.  Rich people prosper, poor people suffer, and that’s about it.

Making matters worse is the fact that the United States is driving in reverse.  Massive numbers of largely uneducated, anti-science voters just re-elected Donald Trump to a second term. We’re in a pathetic condition.

I’m not giving up either but ignoring the core of the problem is not helpful.

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Yesterday, I happened to meet a guy who works for the California Department of Fish and Game whose life’s work is hunting nutria, an invasive species of rodent shown at left.

“What’s the deal with the nutria?” I asked?

The answer, in essence: Nutria could be said to be the anti-matter of the beaver.  Where the latter improves every aspect of the biosphere it inhabits, the former destroys the local wetland environment, primarily through their ravenous consumption of aquatic vegetation, (roots and all) which destabilizes the soil leading to erosion, which, in turn, destroys critical habitat for other wildlife and disrupts the entire wetland ecosystem balance.

According to the fellow I met, what they do to the manmade portion of the environment is arguably even worse, e.g., undermining bridge footings.

I asked what they look like, to which the guy said, “Just imagine a 20-pound hamster.”  When I searched for the picture above, I realized that I would call it an ugly 20-pound hamster.

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It’s true that Trump is probably the greatest single one-person threat to our capacity to address climate change mitigation and adaptation, not only in America, but in the world as a whole.  That’s because a) he won the 2024 U.S. presidential election with his  extraordinary skill at reeling in the affection of our nation’s least educated and most scientifically illiterate people, and b) has consistently made great use of the torrents of donations he’s received from the multi-trillion dollar fossil fuel industry.

Let’s face facts: he’s intensely good at what he does, in this case, ruining this planet for his own enrichment.

Is there something we can do to turn this around?  Frankly, I’m not sure.

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Regarding English grammar, would you be well advised to “do as you please,” per the suggestion at left?

The fact that we have adopted words and phrases from other languages doesn’t mean that butchering the English language comes without a cost — if being accepted by educated people is at all important to you.

I told my children when they were young, “Other people can’t see your thoughts, but they can hear what you say and read what you write.  If you can’t speak or write well, they will infer that you can’t think well.  Don’t put yourself in that position.  People in other countries learn at least two or three, sometimes four or five languages.  You only need to get one down well.”

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At left is an ad for an environmental conference in Dubai.  While the event itself may be interesting, the answer to the question posed here is No.

The entire world and everyone living on it has been warned for many decades about climate change and the urgent to mitigate it and adapt to it, yet our leaders in both the public and private sectors have been incapable of making any real progress in decarbonizing our energy and transportation sectors.

We may need to conclude that the evolutionary path of humankind ultimately got us to the point of an insurmountable amount of greed and selfishness.  It’s hard to explain our behavior in any other way.

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The big difference between the current Gilded Age and the last one is the fragility of the environment.  In the late 19th Century, we weren’t roasting our planet and losing tens of thousands of species annually.

Sure, environmental science was in its infancy, if it existed at all, but no one thought we were headed towards imminent collapse.

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As we take in these words of the great primatologist Jane Goodall, one obvious thought is this: How sure are we that we’ll still be here at some point in the future to have the opportunity to look back?

In an earlier post today, I mentioned that there are plenty of scientists who believe that organized human civilization will not survive the next few decades, due to runaway climate change and the loss of biodiversity, especially that which is occurring at the base of our food chains. e.g., the dramatic collapse of insect populations.

Many American schoolchildren in the southern part of the United States are still taught that the American Civil War was caused by northern aggression, where Union soldiers attacked the south, raped their women, and stole their land?

German philosopher Georg Hegel told us, “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”

How could this turn out any differently, when we deliberately lie about our past?  What’s the matter with telling the truth?   

 

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Here’s an article in which some of our planet’s top minds predict the unraveling of human civilization sometime between 2040 and 2050, driven largely by the loss of biodiversity and climate change.  According to these folks, the only way for our society to survive is not the deployment of technology, but the change in our behavior.

And that doesn’t seem likely, when the last Conference of Parties (to address global warming) was held in a petrostate (Azerbaijan), and was presided over by the CEO of an oil company.  Moreover, the next COP will be essentially a reprise of the one that just concluded.

From the article:

In this corner, the biosphere. We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annuallyinsect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox (see photo above) has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses (diseases that can be transmitted to humans from animals) expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050.

They go on to point out that Darwin told us in 1859 that we thought the human race would not achieve sustainability, and would eventually go the way of all these other species, i.e., extinction.

These people aren’t optimistic, and their viewpoints are not childish, but neither are they set in stone.

Let’s go back that “behavior” thing.  It seems perfectly possible that the 8+ billion people on this planet will do what the folks in Norway did, as an example, and simply stopped buying cars that run on gasoline and diesel.

It’s true that the zeitgeist here in the United States is rooted in a staggering level of ignorance and the indifference to the suffering of others, collectively referred to as “MAGA,” but that can fade as quickly as it came into being. The level of absurdity in today’s news could easily, at any moment, cause a watershed event in the American culture, away from the lunacy of 2024.   How many alcoholic Fox News hosts can we put in change of things like national defense before we say Enough!

This isn’t over.

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At left is a profound thought, but it’s one that the vast majority of Trump supporters can’t relate to.  The incoming president’s billionaire friends got rich by exploiting America’s workforce, not by helping the working class achieve its own affluence and pleasant living conditions.

I’m a generally optimistic guy, but I write these words with absolutely no hope that the MAGA world is going to figure this out.

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