Is the world being destroyed?

Hurricane Ida should have been America’s wake up call.

Climate collapse won’t be restricted to a single threat nor will it hit everyone at the same time in some distant future.

Regional systemic collapse is a cascade of overlapping events, seemingly disparate, but each contributing to the failure of the area to recover.

It’s here now.

The catastrophes combine and manifest as multiple failures, each crisis compounding the other until a demoralized populace as well as government officials find responding no longer desirable, financially feasible, or even possible. Basically, so much goes wrong — and keeps going wrong — that everyone gives up.

Regional system failure can occur when repeat disasters such as weather events destroy already weakened infrastructure. Resources are further strained. Recovery can’t happen fast enough and the area collapses.

Let’s call it “infrastructure weak”

It’s no secret that America has been relying on an aging infrastructure to keep commerce moving.

Many of the post WWII projects of roads, bridges, railways, and ports have not been adequately maintained nor improved. The nation’s vulnerable electrical grid garners the most attention, but few realize that there are 10,000 miles of levees where the location and condition are unknown. That is a frightening fact in light of expected flooding from climate collapse.

After the next weather event slams into a region, addressing these numerous deficiencies will become an emergency and much more difficult.

If we didn’t see value in maintaining this infrastructure in good times, the question becomes whether it is worth it at all.

If left unchecked, the economy of the region will be crippled because commerce cannot continue, and then recovery is further delayed or abandoned. Jobs are lost, homes foreclosed, families evicted. Eventually, the region may become uninhabitable or the remaining residents live in a constant state of disruption without the conveniences of modern life.

Those who can migrate out of the region will do so, and at great personal cost, taking with them money and jobs — and the sort of political clout to demand a fix to the problems. Much could be saved if these migrations occurred before the failures.

On a national level, federal officials tasked with the recovery effort will find themselves triaging competing regional failures — whether the raging California wildfires deserve more resources than flooding in the northeast or drought in the southwest.

Hurricane Ida and her friends pay a visit

We may have our first glimpse of what a national systemic failure might look like as the country grapples with increasing fallout from extreme weather this summer.

Hurricane Ida proved to be a deadly storm, its 150 mph winds ripped through Louisiana and spawned a tornado in New Jersey while flooding low lying areas as far away as New York. It was a 1,500-mile **** storm exposing our weakness in a fight against Mother Nature and she is kicking our ass.

In years past, when society was more stable, these types of events still wreaked havoc, but officials responded swiftly to begin the slow process of recovery. When the disaster was over, it was over. Then we rebuilt.

Perhaps we shouldn’t.

In the aftermath of Ida, it may take months to resurrect the power grid because the region never fully recovered from previous storms. Regional systemic failure can take years or decades to be fully realized. The seeds of Louisiana’s failure were planted 15 years ago.

In 2020, hurricane Laura destroyed transmission lines, which required crews abandon improvements to the aging system to address Ida’s power outages. But that was only a drop in the proverbial bucket.

The region still grapples to undo $2 billion in damage from three storms in earlier years. But the failures stretch back even further, all the way to August, 2005.

Louisiana never fully recovered after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Instead of consulting with climate experts on the feasibility of rebuilding, officials moved forward with a $15 billion federal levee. Much like today, climate scientists were ignored.

In the steady march toward failure, the next weather event may usher in further destruction, and that may be the disaster where there is no recovery.

We know there will be a next time. Hurricane Larry is out in the Atlantic, the third major storm this season. Experts say it won’t be the last.

And storms are only one disaster impacting recovery.

Putting the systemic in failure

A pandemic overwhelms hospitals. A strained supply chain creates shortages in needed supplies. Trucking delays stretch out the recovery time frame from weeks to months. Emergency responders are now in a marathon to address the most pressing crisis before the next disaster strikes.

We are now reacting to a series of events without the luxury of planning to mitigate a future crisis. And why would we if we never took the opportunity in the past? If it wasn’t worth it then, maybe we should question whether it is the best option now.

Rising sea levels have been predicted for decades and severe Atlantic storms come as no surprise to Gulf states. Yet we continue to fight this losing battle in a region beset with disasters with no hope for a happy ending.

No one wants to talk about whether we should abandon areas like New Orleans that are experiencing this sort of systemic failure.

Instead, we slowly rebuild infrastructure in places like Miami, Fort Lauderdale and even Washington DC even though we will inevitably abandon these communities. It’s difficult to consider letting these areas fall into ruin now despite knowing what they will become in the next 20 or 30 years.

We have no long term, comprehensive plan to relocate communities of people that are unsustainable. We don’t even acknowledge the reality of it happening. Instead, we pour resources into rebuilding, throwing good money after bad.

We muzzled our scientists because no one wanted to admit that everyone living in the Florida Keys were screwed. The suggested course of action is often too painful to consider even though the same experts have been remarkably prescient in their warnings.

Besides, we are too busy addressing emergencies to plan for the future.

In the wake of Ida, the need to restore power to Louisiana’s hospitals overrides the discussion of whether we should be treating COVID patients in a known disaster area. The dynamic repeats through other regional failures. The demand to stop a California wildfire threatening hundreds of homes trumps the debate on whether we should allow rebuilding in disaster areas. Locals demand recovery even when it does not make sense for the long term viability of the area.

The science has been turned into a political football. The experts are sidelined, their proposed solutions too bitter to swallow. No one wants to consider whether we should move our nation’s capital further inland, but this is a discussion we should be having now.

Ignoring the alarms from scientists, and turning a blind eye to systemic failure, people flock to buy expensive real estate in areas under the greatest threat from climate change — places like Las Vegas where the average home price has increased 21.4% in the past year, according to Zillow.

What happens when the disaster gets too big?

It may be impossible to find long term solutions to areas doomed to systemic failure. The size of the catastrophe could be unmanageable. Forced migration may be the only alternative, a proposal no politician will entertain.

Already brewing is one such insurmountable problem — the drought in the southwest.

Lake Mead, the nation’s largest man made reservoir, is sitting at 36% capacity and expected to drop another 20 feet before 2022.

It may never be full again.

With 25 million people dependent on the dwindling water from the Colorado River system, Mead is developing into a catalyst for regional systemic failure due to an intractable drought.

Las Vegas has a population larger than all of Vermont and gets 90% of its water from the Colorado River. The city has conservation efforts in place such as returning reclaimed water to the reservoir but it’s not enough. The issue is the number of people moving into the region which is not being addressed. The Las Vegas area is expected to grow from 2.4 million to over 3 million residents by 2035, according to the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada.

It seems that climate change denial is a shared delusion by individuals as well as entire communities.

The Lake Mead reservoir has nearly reached “dead pool”, so low it can no longer generate electricity. Alarm bells should have been ringing long before now. Before the drought and potential loss of power generation at Mead, the economy was taking a beating. Vegas tourism has experienced a 55% drop thanks to COVID, a pandemic which is still out of control for the near future.

Regional systemic failure has begun, yet no one is taking steps to address it. The tough question we should ask our scientists is if we should make long term plans to reduce the population of the area.

No one asks because we don’t want to hear the answer.

The disasters in the region now overlap — climate, economic, health, unsustainable growth. It wouldn’t take much to push the “entertainment capital of the world” off a cliff — an earthquake, terrorist attack, or wildfire are strong contenders for a black swan event. Given enough time, something will occur, so the question becomes whether officials can solve any one crisis before the next event hits.

The scope of the problem is unimaginable. The only viable solution appears to be degrowth and relocation, or at minimum limiting people coming into the region with an eye toward easing into a reduction of the population to more sustainable levels. Instead, Las Vegas city officials are looking into ways to drain Lake Mead further to quench the thirst of future development.

No one asks what happens when it’s empty.

Those people ultimately displaced will go elsewhere, an unplanned migration which creates problems in other communities.

The next crisis doesn’t have to be particularly dramatic, nor does it have to cause widespread damage, but only large enough to cripple a region for weeks or even months. If it hits in an area already dealing with destruction, it could render the crisis as a permanent fixture — leaving surrounding areas also vulnerable to collapse. The region could become a literal “disaster area” that never recovers.

This is regional systemic failure and it is here now. The question is whether we will address it.

And the world isn't just only the USA or Europe. (While the population in Asia, which has many economically underdeveloped countries, is increasing exponentially, the population in Europe, where many of the countries are economically developed, is growing much more slowly.)

Walter, this is also mathematically incorrect. The population in Asia is also not increasing exponentially. I just looked around, I don't think there is even a single country in Asia that is experiencing exponential growth, not Bangladesh, not Cambodia not Korea.

You just made this up because you are arguing an ideological narrative. It isn't true... and clearly you didn't even check before you posted this.

Let's review the human population growth rate discussion.

1) A political argument makes the argument that the global population is growing exponentially (it isn't).

2) When that doesn't work, hightor states emphatically that the global population may not be exponential now, but was growing exponentially in "past few centuries" (it was not)

But the key part here is that They can't seem to accept a basic fact that contradicts their ideological narrative.

Which of these two basic facts of mathematics are you having a problem with

And no, it doesn't illustrate the technical meaning of "exponential" as used by scientists.

Again, this is making up fictional claims to make an extreme ideological point.

Of course, you can argue what "near" means... but the current water level is significantly higher than the minimum reached in 2016.

Do we all accept that the growth rate of human population is falling significantly.