Rupert Read is one of the most radical thinkers I know. This will not cheer you up (although I have to say I much enjoy Rupert's company) but I think it well worth watching, even if it is long:
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I reached this realisation around 10 years ago,
I read The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler and then a research paper from Dr Tim Morgan at Tullett Prebon called The End of Growth,
as more time passes since their writing the more events validate their projections,
both publications reminded me of all the individual things I already knew but lined them all up neatly in one overarching narrative and triggered such a profound realisation of quite how screwed we really are that I became pretty much dysfunctional for a year or two,
I’m back on an even keel and eager to get on with something practical but most people still seem to be in a trance, I don’t think they dare look into the abyss because it’ll scare the shit out of them like it did me!
my apologies,
it’s perfect storm, energy, finance and the end of growth
Dr Tim Morgan
https://www.tullettprebon.com/Documents/strategyinsights/TPSI_009_Perfect_Storm_009.pdf
and
https://www.amazon.com/Long-Emergency-Converging-Catastrophes-Twenty-First/dp/0802142494
Interesting, I’ll watch the rest later but…
He so far (18 mins) misses out a fourth possibility:
WW3 followed by the victors imposing dramatic population reduction on the vanquished.
Effectively an enormous genocidal war the likes of which we’ve never seen (but for which there have sadly been many precedents). In the aftermath the victors simply carry on with a more technologically advanced version of our existing civilization.
This could be between existing states and alliances of states (but likely only if a temporary technological advantage allowed one side to circumvent the risk of all out nuclear war).
However the protagonists could be unlike any we’ve yet seen historically. If the nuclear armed elites from different nations come to the realisation (if they have not already) that their interests are more aligned with each other than their own people WW3 would pit the superpower elites vs the global masses and the non-nuclear powers in a genocidal total war.
Just because we civilised and progressive folk won’t even consider population reduction as an option does not mean that psychopathic, sociopathic or seriously hard-nosed members of the power elite will similarly discard this option.
The most terrifying and unsettling thought that arises is this: if the most likely alternative scenarios were genuinely human extinction or the extinction of all life on earth would the elite even be entirely wrong to consider such a genocidal course of action?
Thankfully Rupert perhaps too easily dismisses a fifth possibility: against the odds technological innovation does ride to our rescue. Humanity then bumbles on to face myriad other terrible existential challenges centuries or millennia from now.
It might
I k now he does not think it will
I think he is right
You are describing +/- Neal Asher’s book “Departure”. Which is truly nasty (& which starts – oddly in Leuven in Belgium). The follow-on book sees the earths population reduce by circa 66%. Could it happen – absolutely.
I stumbled upon this,
http://www.deagel.com/country/forecast.aspx
it’s done the rounds of a few chat rooms and had peeps freaking out and losing their shit and saying it confirms their wildest pet conspiracy theory (adjusts tinfoil hat) but really it’s just a sober extrapolation of current trends and available data,
there’s a quick explanation of the sites methodology at the bottom, easy to dismiss if you prefer to remain blind to what’s happening around you, but if you’re open to what already happening it’s quite plausable.
I am intruiged to know what ‘population reduction’ means. Is it enforced birth control or something more aggresive? Would enforced birth control apply to every country or just those with high population growth? After all, children born in the developed world are much more of a burden on the environment than those in the developing world!
The best estimates suggest that a global population of 10 billion is unavoidable but that there is achance for a decline to begin soon after. The best contraceptives appear to be education and wealth.
well yes the best way to stabilise birth rate and family size is education and not so much wealth but a degree of financial security and stability,
education includes the ideas of basic healthcare, sanitation, suitable and sustainable agricultural practices, small scale economic management, a general understanding of the basics of physics, biology, chemisty, literacy, numeracy, etc.
equipped with this sort of basic knowledge people can make rational decisions, organise their affairs and achieve a degree of economic and food security, reduced infant mortality and increased lifespan,
the extended lifespan increases the likelihood of beneficial knowledge being passed from generation to generation.
development in other words?
to me contraception has overtones of no births at all and wealth hints of more is better without any limit,
my understanding of rapid population reduction is that it is mostly involuntary, for reference see the four horsemen of the apocalypse,
when people immediately percieve population reduction as forced sterilisation and death camps I think it’s probably a reflection of their own inner darkness.
the populations of europe and japan have peaked and have been reducing for some time, if you exclude migration,
recently news has broken that china’s population has also peaked,
when I see this reported as a ‘demographic disaster’ I know it’s only a disaster from the perspective of the perpetual growth mantra which anyone with half an ounce of sense knows is impossible.
if it was announced that western populations were in gentle decline and the developing worlds populations were peaking and after a stabilisation period were expected to start gently declining I’d be delighted.
with a focus on gdp per capita instead of national gdp and a global population retreating to a level more suited to a sustainable carrying capacity of our planet the future would look considerably more rosy.
One possible new source of energy is Methane Hydrate. There are huge deposits but it will be difficult to extract. One significant advantage is that if we use a significant part of the reserves then it’s runaway effect on climate change will be reduced. This is because methane is 40 better at warming the planet than CO2 and it is released by warming the land and sea deposits. It could replace all the energy production of oil and nuclear. A project to find a way extract the carbon from the hydrogen would be a good secondary project.
You present what you make sound a highly implausible argument
“A project to find a way extract the carbon from the hydrogen”….already done & is called natural gas pyrolysis – the two outputs are solid carbon and hydrogen.
Gazprom is working on scaling up the tech (they were showing it at the recent COP) and the USA is funding a number of nat gas pryrolysis projects – likewise focused on scale-up.
The tricky bit will be collecting the methane hydrate – at depth (+/- 800 mtres) – possibly large impermedable sheets with utlra sound to shatter the semi-crystalline structure of the hydrates. I just thought that one up btw.
pyrolysing natural gas to create hydrogen, which I believe is the main industrial technique for manufacturing hydrogen, and then using it for a hydrogen economy always ignores the fact you need yet more energy to perform the pyrolisation process,
so it would be more efficient to just have lpg powered cars than go through all the wasteful and energy consuming gymnastics to create hydrogen which only displaces the pollution from the city where the car is used to the plant where the hydrogen is made.
and we already use the natural gas for a myriad of other things, natural gas is the feedstock for agricultual fertilisers and plastics and also generates electricity and heats homes,
the natural gas is a finite resource which although still relatively abundant has also reached peak production.
as for methane hydrate releasing and capture projects, well the warming planet is releasing the methane hydrates and it’s being captured in the atmosphere causing further warming.
as far as I know the only stable and succesful, tried and tested way of stripping co2 out of the atmosphere and binding it in the form of solid carbon that can be sequestered in the ground is photosynthesis,
that’s how the fossil fuels were formed in the first place,
there are no plausible techno fantasist solutions to the fact that we’ve been doing, and continue to do some very stupid things.
the first rule of engineering is K.I.S.S. keep it simple stupid!