Nitrogen Fertilizer is part of the great progress we have made in agriculture in the past century what a term (reminds me of ENHANCED RADIATION)
1. We continued criticism of capitalism, there has yet to be any suggestion of any alternative to capitalism.
This is true because it stopped people from starving to death...
If the political left is going to continue bitching about progress, then they should honest about the alternative and the consequences.
There's a difference between posting critical observations and "bitching about" something. maxdancona likes to set up responses which contain a low-grade insult; it's a variation on the "Are you still beating your wife" tactic, a cheap rhetorical trick. Notice, he doesn't post any examples of this "bitching about", he doesn't show why they're examples of "bitching about" as opposed to "denouncing", "attacking", or "assailing" negative aspects of the prevailing economic system — he's too busy bitching about posts which don't conform to his high standards!
If returning to a point in history where human beings were facing starvation is really a good thing, make that argument honestly.
The UK has recorded its lowest ever number of butterflies in an annual survey of the insects, prompting conservationists to warn that nature is in crisis.
Butterfly Conservation, which counted butterflies and moths between 16 July and 8 August, said the results, released on Thursday, marked the lowest numbers since the Big Butterfly Count started 12 years ago and called for urgent action to be taken.
It is the latest warning sign for butterflies – which, as well as forming a vital part of the food chain, are considered significant indicators of the health of the environment – after decades of decline. Since 1976, 76% of butterflies have declined either in abundance or distribution.
Julie Williams, the charity’s chief executive, said: “The facts are clear. Nature is in crisis and we need urgent action, not just to prevent further species losses but to rebuild biodiversity.”
Of the 150,000 counts registered in this year’s snapshot, the most submitted to date, volunteers counted an average of nine butterflies or moths each count, down from an average of 11 last year and 16 in 2019.
Overall, there were 1,238,405 butterflies and moths counted – a 14% reduction on last year. The survey is carried out by volunteers who count the number and type of butterflies or moths they see in 15 minutes.
Among the species with significantly reduced counts were the small tortoiseshell, which dropped 32% and is in long-term decline in the UK, and the peacock butterfly, which was 63% down on last year and had its lowest count since 2012. Others that saw marked drops on last year were the comma (-32%), speckled wood (-41%) and common blue (-59%).
There were higher numbers of ringlets and marbled whites in this year’s count, which rose by 81% and 213% year-on-year respectively. But, the charity warned, the increases could simply reflect lower counts last year.
Zoë Randle, a senior surveys officer at Butterfly Conservation, said an extremely wet May, which brought the UK’s fourth-highest amount of rainfall on record for the month, was a significant factor for butterfly numbers, hindering their breeding and feeding.
“Butterflies don’t like the rain at all, they’re coldblooded insects. Effectively they’re solar-powered,” she said.
This was especially bad for species that produce two broods a year, most of which had their worst year in the history of the survey. “That first brood would have been really hammered by that wet May. So breeding success would have been limited, which led to fewer offspring being available to create the second generation,” said Randle, adding that it would have a knock-on effect on next year’s count.
And with extreme weather events expected to increase as a result of climate breakdown, it is feared the long-term impact on butterflies and moths could be devastating.
Butterfly Conservation has pledged to halve the number of threatened species in the UK, double its impact on landscape restoration and encourage people to create new wild nature spaces.
If action was not taken to protect them, Randle said, it would lead to a “continued degradation of the environment and the natural world”.
In addition to unusual weather patterns, Brian Eversham, an entomologist and the chief executive of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire Wildlife Trust, said insects were facing numerous pressures including habitat loss, polluted waterways and dangerous pesticide use.
But, he added: “While these findings are unsettling, we shouldn’t underestimate nature’s ability to recover if given a chance. We can all help by creating more habitats for wildlife.”
When Hollywood imagines the end of the world, they almost invariably turn to exciting-looking literal interpretations like collapsing buildings, urban warfare, supermarket bandits and suburban barbarians — explosions and whatever looks cool on the big screen.
But the reality of the climate crisis isn’t like The Day After Tomorrow, Dawn of the Dead, or Independence Day. Because that kind of collapse isn’t how things will work.
Civilization won’t end in a hail of bombs and bullets. A realistic societal collapse scenario will probably look more like Children of Men. Society will crumble over decades, hit by breakdown after breakdown — a million little cuts — until it’s so brittle that the center can no longer hold. Different regions may go into decline, and in the interim, we’ll likely see human misery rise in tandem with things like fascism and authoritarian strongmen.
Climate change may inflict the cuts that eventually strip society to its bones, or we may limp along in a new Dark Ages, but the most important things are what happens to our civilization as it’s ribboned, and how we react.
The pandemic is a preview of how we’ll respond to the climate crisis
Climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic are two crises that bear striking similarities. In 2020, we all watched the world try and fail to absorb the blow of COVID-19. We saw how fragile many of the systems and basic infrastructure of civilization really are.
COVID-19 not only put immense pressure on our health care system, but also drove supply line crunches, labor shortages, and a run on essential items. There were culture war fights over masks, anti-lockdown protests, and an explosion of conspiracy theories. You could see this as just a stroke of poor luck borne of a one-in-a-century pandemic, but the coronavirus is more than a speed bump. It’s a harbinger of things to come.
Like coronavirus, climate change is a problem of collective action, and we’re not up to the challenge.
Just before the COVID pushed all other news to the margins in early 2020, Australia caught on fire — they were enveloped in the largest bushfires in the nation’s history. More than 2,300 square miles burned. Disasters like this are becoming commonplace. They already happen with apocalyptic regularity — five times more frequently than they did fifty years ago.
Like COVID-19, the climate crisis exacerbates the risks and weaknesses in our systems. The problems we faced in the coronavirus pandemic are a preview of our climate-change future. Disasters will ride in on the ripples of destabilized ecosystems and scrambled weather patterns, and human systems will falter in now-familiar ways.
The whole planet was affected by the pandemic, and we moved aggressively to tackle the coronavirus problem but, without coordination, the results have varied widely from country to country. It’s not hard to imagine a similar story playing out around climate change. As things get hotter, different regions may go into decline, collapse, or succumb to reactionary politics at different stages of the climate crisis. And it’s all coming much sooner than most of us expect.
We underestimated the speed of the climate crisis
The United Nations climate science advisors are warning that the worst projected impacts of climate change are hitting much faster than previously expected. We could hit the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming as early as 2024.
For years, staying under 1.5 degrees Celsius has been the goal — a line in the sand. But even if we stopped all other forms of emissions right now, agriculture alone will carry us over that 1.5 degrees Celsius line in just a handful of years.
The 1.5 degrees of warming target has long been seen as the acceptable and relatively pleasant option. Without radical change starting right now, staying close to 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius will be beyond reach.
Even the IPCC’s generally assumed safe operating space of 1.5 or 2 degrees warming might not be all that safe. A recent study — gathering the work of scientists from 18 universities working in tandem — shows that key indicators of climate change are approaching critical tipping points.
Previous models were largely far too optimistic in their assumptions about how gradual planetary warming would be. Conservative results are a built-in feature of reports from places like the IPCC. The process of arriving at a scientific consensus, where a group can issue a report and speak in one voice, favors moderation and naturally trends toward more unchallenging results at the low end of predictive models.
Because of how decision-making works and consensus is reached on what the report will say, the process naturally produces reports that tend toward producing a moderated outlook that isn’t necessarily connected to our reality and isn’t very useful.
A 2019 article in Scientific American describes how the process goes awry.
“How does this lead to underestimation? Consider a case in which most scientists think that the correct answer to a question is in the range 1–10, but some believe that it could be as high as 100. In such a case, everyone will agree that it is at least 1–10, but not everyone will agree that it could be as high as 100. Therefore, the area of agreement is 1–10, and this is reported as the consensus view. Wherever there is a range of possible outcomes that includes a long, high-end tail of probability, the area of overlap will necessarily lie at or near the low end. Error bars can be (and generally are) used to express the range of possible outcomes, but it may be difficult to achieve consensus on the high end of the error estimate.”
How bad could climate change get?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is now painting the coming decades as one of the extremes, with increasing heat waves, longer warm seasons, and shorter cold seasons. At 2 degrees Celsius global warming, we’ll start hitting critical tolerance thresholds for agriculture and a laundry list of other deleterious effects.
A UN climate change Twitter thread laid out how 1.5, 2 and 3+ degrees Celsius represent dramatically different futures for humanity.
It’s not a linear progression from 1.5 to 2 to 3 degrees Celsius of warming. Each point on the thermometer creates a radically different world. But data and lived experience have made it increasingly clear that 1.5 degrees, which we’re certain to hit very soon, is an almost unfathomable catastrophe and, at the same time, our best chance.
We’re staring down the barrel of multiple climate tipping points right now. As we approach and cross 2 degrees Celsius of warming, we’re talking about feedback loops and runaway effects that we can’t entirely predict.
We’ll see things that there’s no coming back from, at least not on human timelines.
Just a degree or two — maybe three — of warming may not seem like a lot, but the last Ice Age — when there is a mile of glacial ice above New York City — was only 5 to 8 degrees Celsius of cooling.
That relatively small shift downward created mind-bogglingly huge glaciers and transformed the world. And those temperature changes happened slowly, over thousands of years. Now we’re looking at a dramatic rise in global temperatures in the span of a single human lifetime — it’s unprecedented.
At a little over 1 degree Celsius of warming, we’re already seeing massive wildfires from Turkey and Greece to the West Coast of the US. Heatwaves trigger more of these megafires which release more carbon into the atmosphere which speeds up warming, which only accelerates the whole cycle, onward and upward.
Scientists say that climate tipping points will likely cause sudden shifts in the Gulf Stream, leading to sudden and massive temperature changes in normally temperate zones. Think of the devastating 2019 heatwave that killed 1,500 people in France or the 2021 blizzard in Texas that knocked power out for days in freezing temperatures and killed up to 1,000 people.
Another recent study analyzed decades of data that suggests that feedback loops will lead to the forests of 2040 only absorbing half as much carbon dioxide as they do now, making them overall producers of carbon instead of carbon sinks.
As we approach 1.5 degrees Celsius, thawing permafrost will release methane, further warming the planet. Forests will hold less carbon. More fires will burn, and more carbon will be released.
All of these factors add literal fuel to the literal and figurative fires driving us toward 2 degrees Celsius of warming or more. If we get to that point we’ll face catastrophic permafrost thawing, and another 230 billion tons of carbon burping out of the soil.
Two degrees of warming will be a genocide. It would mean an extra 150 million people dying from air pollution alone by the end of the century — 25 Holocausts. And those aren’t the only climate-related deaths. Once-in-a-century flooding events will happen over and over again from China to Nebraska and unbearable heat waves will sweep the planet. It’s mass die-offs. It’s island nations disappearing forever under the waves. It’s the destabilization of entire ecosystems.
Right now, more than 5 million deaths a year are linked to climate change. The mortality due to global warming this century will be staggering.
We created the climate crisis in the span of a single lifetime
It is important to note that nearly all of the carbon that’s causing these problems was released into the atmosphere within the span of a human lifetime. The majority of the CO2 in the atmosphere today has been released since the premiere of Seinfeld, and more than 85% has been since WWII.
This short timespan inspires hope in some. If the problem only started when your grandpa was a kid, perhaps it can be fixed in a lifetime, too. It doesn’t work that way. Once the carbon is out — once the pee is in the pool — there’s no getting it out, at least not in any timeframe humans think in.
The belched carbon — the millions of acres of wildfires, the exhaust pipes of hundreds of millions of cars, the smokestacks of factories — is there to stay.
Like coronavirus, climate change is a problem of collective action, and we’re not up to the challenge. The virus could have been halted by something as simple as everyone wearing masks in public, social distancing, and putting the world on pause for a few weeks. Most of the world could not handle that.
We do not live in a healthy society.
The chaos of our politics in the face of coronavirus shows that we’re not up to the coordinated effort it will take to radically reorganize society around sustainable living.
The endless parade of problems we’ll have to contend with over the next 50 years — rising sea levels, out-of-control wildfires, widespread crop failures, tidal waves of refugees, rising reactionary movements — will make us look back at our current pandemic with fond nostalgia.
The role of climate refugees in sparking a fascist and authoritarian renaissance
Rising temperatures create climate refugees, which almost inevitably ends in a rising fascist and authoritarian backlash. Whole nations are going to sink under the oceans or be enveloped by expanding deserts, enormous wildfires will tear across countries, there will be famine and wars, and ultimately, hundreds of millions of refugees. The cataclysms of the 21st and 22nd centuries will make the Syrian refugee crisis look tame in comparison.
A World Bank report projects that by 2050 climate disasters could push an additional 200 million people from their homes. The United Nations says the number of climate refugees could reach as high as one billion.
The Syrian Civil War of the last decade triggered a diaspora — millions of refugees fled into Europe in the wake of the catastrophic violence there. Climate change was arguably a major factor in fueling the brutal conflict that spread across the country. And the resulting refugee crisis sparked something else: The rising right-wing in Europe.
Extreme weather and extreme politics seem to go together. These fascist and authoritarian flavors of the far-right are fierce opponents of immigration and refugee resettlement. We’ll see more attempts at Trump-style border walls to keep the masses of the global South out. And as things get worse we may see the rhetoric turn more sinister. We’ve already seen politicians like Donald Trump harp on the danger of refugees from Syria, Latin America, and nearly everywhere else.
The ruling class in America knows only one solution for dealing with the increasing problems of climate change: More men with guns.
As more countries suffer and economies are devastated by climate change, the waves of climate refugees will push higher. And along with that will come the claims from right-wing politicians that they’re causing crime, drug use, and violence. Eventually, rhetoric gives way to politics, then power, and finally policy solutions.
Authoritarians have always used fear of the other — specifically fear of foreign asylum seekers — to stoke division. It’s part of their strategy to seek power. And that piece of the strategy only gets easier from here on out. Climate change will no doubt feed into America’s rising fascist movement — it’s already with us today and not going anywhere soon.
Climate change makes society more authoritarian
And climate change doesn’t just provide opportunities for authoritarian politicians. It tends to make society itself more authoritarian by increasing military conflicts and responses to domestic crime. There are few things more American than over-the-top patriotism and a love of the thin blue line.
The Center for Naval Analysis, a government-funded military research organization produced a report signed by Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta titled National Security and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change.
The report begins:
“The nature and pace of observed climate changes — and an emerging scientific consensus on their projected consequences — pose severe risks for our national security. During our decades of experience in the U.S. military, we have addressed many national security challenges, from containment and deterrence of the Soviet nuclear threat during the Cold War to political extremism and transnational terrorism in recent years. The national security risks of projected climate change are as serious as any challenges we have faced.”
The report goes on to warn about conflicts over resources, particularly water scarcity, that could spin out of control
It’s not hard to imagine scenarios in which wars start over resources and even things like how other countries manage world resources within their borders. It’s not hard to picture a military intervention to stop Brazil from logging in the Amazon and clear-cutting for crop production. The Amazon is a huge carbon sink ecosystem crucial for the health of the whole planet. Brazil is already setting up military bases in the remote Amazon.
And that high-intensity interventionism to resources or impose order for the greater social, economic, and political good — or at least for a specific nationalist agenda — will result in heightened reactions to the interventions. All in all, it brings a more violent and militarized future.
With a hyper-militarized border, an economic model of hyper-scarcity, conflicts abroad fueling nationalism, and tensions at home, people are increasingly likely to turn to reactionary politics. It’s no secret how both the Democratic Party and Republican Party will react to civil unrest, even a whiff of it.
In 2020, President Trump responded to a nationwide uprising against police brutality by backing more police violence. Unsurprisingly, he enjoyed near-universal support for his reelection from police unions. At least 31 police officers participated in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot aimed at keeping Trump in power. A gambit that didn’t pan out.
The Biden administration’s plan for dealing with domestic terrorism is $100 million in funding for local law enforcement, including more police, prosecutors, and investigators. Biden also suggested that communities should spend much of the $350 billion COVID aid dispensed to hire more police officers.
The ruling class in America knows only one solution for dealing with the increasing problems of climate change: More men with guns.
The odds aren’t in our favor. But some things are worth fighting for even when you’re likely to lose.
With more cops than ever before in the U.S., we’ve solved fewer murders. In 2020, there were more than 800,000 sworn law enforcement officers serving nationwide — the highest number ever. That same year, homicides rose nearly 40% among the nation’s 10 largest police departments while the clearance rate dropped 7% in those same departments.
Biden’s 2022 budget calls for $36 billion to fight climate change. That sounds great until you add context. According to a report from Morgan Stanley, keeping climate change under 2 degrees Celsius could cost as much as $50 trillion. Biden’s gesture at fighting climate change is barely a drop in the bucket, and not even close to what the US spends on policing and prisons each year.
The danger of the American far right is already here
The American far-right has spent decades building a media echo chamber. In the last few years, they’ve reframed their political opponents — Democrats and, really, anyone to their left — as literal enemies. To many on the Right, nearly half the people in this country demons hellbent on the destruction of America.
Right now, most Republicans think the 2020 election was stolen, and a disturbing 23% of Republicans believe satanic pedophiles control the US government, the media, and the banks. Nearly a third of Republicans believe that they might need to resort to violence to preserve their idea of American values.
A frightening number of Republicans already seem prepped to kill to protect what they think America is. The good news is that a clear majority of Americans do not think like this. The bad news is that the far-right has already convinced a sufficient number of Americans to be extremely dangerous. All they need is a large group of less radical people who are nonetheless scared and confused enough to buy into the lies and follow along. It’s not hard to imagine this.
Consider the National Socialist German Workers Party. In 1932, they won their largest election victory ever, and still got less than 40% of the vote. But even as a minority party they were still able to seize the levers of government and begin the march toward world war. The key was that the Nazis were unified, the political system was biased in their favor, and infighting made the opposition impotent. All of those same things can be said of contemporary American politics.
We can only save each other
The solution for combating authoritarian nationalism and fascism is also how we prepare for environmental collapse. The one thing that can cut through lies — that can build the empathy necessary to forestall terror and make these people unlikely to support or at least dismiss your murder — is community. When you help build community — a place of belonging where people’s material and emotional needs are met — they have whatever they need and feel valued and cared for — you’re building peace.
Strong communities undercut the ability of authoritarians to take advantage of climate change and its related crises. When the system starts falling apart, authoritarians always step in with a promise to help the Real Americans in need and return the country to the way things were. A strong community that has built real bonds — one that hasn’t divided itself along partisan or racial lines — is harder to take advantage of.
We are living through the early stages of a global climate disaster that will last many lifetimes — perhaps we’re headed into a new Dark Ages. But it’s not all bad. This gives us the chance to bring about new modes of living, new ways of organizing society, new visions of how the world could exist. This is why these times are so dangerous. It’s also why they hold so much promise.
The odds aren’t in our favor. But some things are worth fighting for even when you’re likely to lose.
We face the risk of descending into the darkness, but we also share the opportunity to build a new, better world from the ashes of the old. Either way, we’re doing it together.
It’s not just me. It’s probably you, too. Have you noticed that it’s starting to be hard to just…get stuff? If you’ve tried buying a car lately, you might have observed that even used car prices have climbed to relatively astronomical levels. The same is beginning to hold true for good after good — from electronics to energy. What’s going on here?
I have some bad news, and I have some…well…worse news. We’re at the beginning of of an era in economic history that’ll probably come to be known as the Great Inflation.
Prices are going to rise, probably significantly, over the course of the next few decades. The reason for that’s simple: everything, more or less, has been artificially cheap. The costs of everything from carbon to fascism to ecological collapse to social fracture haven’t been factored in — ever, from the beginning of the industrial age. But that age is now coming to a sudden, climactic, explosive end. The problem is that, well, we’re standing in the way.
Let me explain, with an example. I was looking for a microphone for a singer I’m working with. I was shocked to read that a well-know German microphone company had just…stopped making them. And furloughed all its workers. It didn’t say why — but it didn’t need to. The reason’s obvious. Steel prices are rising, and they’re going to to keep rising, because energy prices are rising. Then there’s the by now infamous “chip shortage,” chips they probably rely on, too. Add all that up, and bang — you’ve got an historic company suddenly imploding.
I’ve heard story after story like this. Small or medium sized companies just…shutting down. They can’t get raw materials. They can’t afford the raw materials they can get. In either case, bang, it’s game over — for the foreseeable future. It’s not just a microphone company — I’ve heard similar stories in industries from medical devices to auto parts to technology. So far, this is just anecdotal — precisely because it’ll take a year or two for the quantitative data to reflect it. But we don’t have to wait that long to see what’s right before our eyes.
The economy is undergoing a profound shock. Unfortunately for us, it’s going to be one of the largest shocks in economic history. It’s a “supply shock,” as economists formally call it — perhaps the greatest of all time. No, I’m not exaggerating. The world can’t get microchips right about now.
A “supply shock” means, in this case, supply itself suddenly implodes. A city’s, town’s, country’s, or in this case, a world’s.
Let’s think about that microchip shortage. What’s it really about? Well, there are three factories in which the majority of the world’s chips are made. Three factories — each hit in a different way. The one in Japan caught fire due to an equipment malfunction — apparently the blaze took hours to put out because of the conditions. The one in Texas was hit by an historic snowstorm, which knocked out power for days. The one in Taiwan is being affected by the worst drought in half a century — and microchips require huge amounts of water to manufacture.
These are all effects of climate change. They might not be the kinds of monocausal direct effects climate change deniers and American pundits look for — the hand of God roasting a factory alive — but they are very much caused by living on a rapidly heating planet. It should be eminently clear to see that when factories are freezing and burning, that is what climate change does to an economy before your very eyes. (And even if you think the Japan fire had little to do with global warming, the face of the matter is that without climate change, two of the world’s largest chip factories would still be open.)
The “chip shortage” is something that the world doesn’t really grasp yet, in its full importance and magnitude. It is the first climate catastrophe related shortage to hit us at a civilizational, global level. In a world of stable temperatures, guess what, we’d probably still have microchips to power our cars and gadgets and AV studios, because factories wouldn’t be losing power or be so parched they don’t have enough water. But they are — and so we do have a microchip shortage that has been caused by climate change, aka global warming.
That’s the first such catastrophe, but it won’t be the last. The chip shortage is just the tip of the immense shockwave rolling down the volcano. It’s just the first burning rock soaring through the ash-filled sky. Today, it’s chips. Tomorrow? Well, some of the things that are already becoming more and more costly to produce are steel, food, and water. That is because all those things rely on energy, and energy is getting more expensive.
Why is energy getting more expensive? The short-term answer is: Covid. Gas producers are hesitant to turn on the taps because they’re afraid that Covid will send the world into lockdown again. But that’s not the real answer. The real answer is that even if they begin to produce more gas, energy prices will go on rising over the long run.
Why? Because right about now, energy is vastly underpriced, like it has been since the beginning of the industrial age. When you buy a gallon of gas, who pays for the pollution, the carbon it emits, which heats the planet? Right about now, nobody does. But over the next few decades, someone’s going to have to. Because we are going to need to use that money to rebuild all the cities and towns and systems and factories wrecked by flood and fire and drought and plague.
Who’s that somebody going to be? Well, it’s probably not going to be energy companies. It’s probably going to be you, since they’re powerful, and you’re powerless.
As the price of energy rises, the price of everything has to rise, too. Because the dirty truth is that our civilisation is still about 80% dependent on fossil fuels. The problem isn’t the electricity grid, as you might think. It’s that making things like steel and cement and glass still use gas. The world has just one fossil fuel free steel factory so far. But our civilisation depends fundamentally on all these things. Without them? We go back to living medieval lives. All our steel and glass and concrete skyscrapers, factories, universities, cities, towns — kiss them goodbye.
What’s made in all those factories which are still ultimately made of by fossil fuels — of steel, cement, glass? Everything. Everything you rely and depend on. Cars, clothes, medicine. The stuff that clothes and feeds your kids. The stuff you “work” on and are tasked with buying and selling. See how deep this rabbit hole really goes?
All that adds up to the prices of everything rising. For how long? For the foreseeable future. At least for a generation or two, I’d say.
Now let me tell you the story that might help make it even clearer, and I’ll put it a little bit more formally.
From the beginning of the industrial age, our economy has “externalized” costs. Costs like what? Costs like carbon. Like the plastic that’s now jamming up the oceans, of cleaning it up. Of the misery and despair that poverty breeds — the political costs of fascism and supremacy, which rear their heads in times of poverty. Of ecological collapse.
How have we “externalised” those costs? Who have we externalised them to? Well, to “future generations,” economists once used to say. All the people who’d have to clean up the oceans and the skies and replant the forests and nurture the animals back to life. And do all that while figuring out ways to make things like steel and concrete and food and glass without killing the planet we lived on, or pushing our societies into fascism by way of inequality. Big job? Biggest in history.
Guess what? We are those “future generations.” The ones economists used to speak of, like it was in some remote future. It wasn’t. We don’t have much a choice left. We clean up the oceans and rivers, beginning now, or we ruin them for a millennia or two. That means killing off fish we eat and water we drink, too. We clean up the skies — or we don’t breathe. We decarbonise how we make stuff — or we don’t have it.
And that is what the Great Inflation really is. Let’s begin with the last point. We have to figure out how to decarbonise basics — steel, cement, food, water, how to make without destroying the planet. We don’t know how. Until we figure it out, prices are going to rise — prices of everything made in factories made of steel, largely still powered by fossil fuels, using raw materials made in other factories powered by other fossil fuels. That’s everything you can think of, from cars to clothes.
We have to figure out how to perform a Great Cleanup, too — cleaning up the oceans, skies, rivers, mountains, rainforests. Then comes a Great Replenishment. We have to replant the forests and nurture the animals and nature — biotic matter — back to life. We have no idea how to do that — we haven’t even begun. Until we do, prices are going to rise, because, well, nature’s underling a mass extinction, the first man-made one in history.
Remember when I said this was the greatest supply shock in history? Now you should be able to get why a little bit. What even comes close to: “we’re annihilating nature so fast we’ve caused the first human-made mass extinction”? Now that’s a supply shock: we’re making nature extinct. Of course prices of everything dependent on it are going to skyrocket, because we’re running out of the supply.
Or let’s come back to decarbonising steel, cement, glass — all the basics of industrial production. Until we do figure it out, all that stuff is just going to keep on getting more expensive. Sure, there’ll be a dip here and there, but the basic principle remains: making that stuff poisons the planet at an accelerating rate, and it’s going to cost more and more to produce, manufacture, distribute, and sell.
That’s not just because of carbon taxes, but for a deeper reason.
Making, producing, distributing, buying, selling the basics of civilisation the dirty way that we do causes climate change — and climate change is trying to teach us a lesson. Climate change is made of fire and flood and typhoon and plague. See the feedback effect? Good luck distributing that batch of steel when there’s a megaflood or megafire in the way. Good luck getting that supertanker full of clothes and gadgets to the right shore when a megatyphoon lasting a month and wrecking a coastline hits…all winter long. And good luck when Covid-21 hits, because, well, we haven’t vaccinated the planet, so it’s sure to — and there goes the economy all over again.
I can put that more simply: the costs of mega floods and fires and typhoons and droughts and plagues now have to be internalized, because the costs of carbon, natural extinction, poverty, ill health, inequality, were all externalized. But these are asymmetrical effects. These costs were externalised for centuries. They will have to be internalized over decades.
See the problem? The huge timescale difference? We’ve been externalising the costs of carbon and natural extinction and inequality and ecological collapse since the beginning of the industrial age. But now we have to internalise them over the next few decades — or its light out.
Human civilisation has never faced the wave of inflationary pressures it does now. It has never had to internalize centuries of externalities over decades — because if someone doesn’t pay those costs, well, then, there is more civilization, no more glass, steel, cement, medicine, factories, clothes, electronics…no more clean air, water, food…no shelter from the megafire or megaflood…and good luck having democracy or rights then.
Someone has to pay for all that. That leaves three parties. One, you and me, average folks, living average lives. Two, megacorporations. Three, the billionaires who own them. Good luck getting them to pay up. It’s a noble effort, don’t get me wrong. But if you ask me realistically? So far, there’s an effort to make global tax rates…15%. LOL. So far, they pay zero, which means you and me are going to have to pay for it all — climate change, mass extinction, ecological collapse, probably while they jet off to Mars.
You’d better prepare for the greatest inflationary wave in human history. It’s going to be really bad. This is just the beginning. It’s going to be a lot like Covid, or climate change — harder, faster, and much, much worse than anyone really thinks right about now.
New York (CNN Business)The cost of energy was dirt cheap in the spring of 2020 as roads and airports sat nearly empty during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Energy demand is back today as the world economy reopens -- but supply simply hasn't kept up. That's why US oil prices have skyrocketed $120 since crashing to negative $40 a barrel in April 2020. US oil prices finished above $80 a barrel on Monday for the first time in nearly seven years.
Crude gained 1.5% to end the day at $80.52. The last time oil closed above $80 was October 31, 2014.
Gas prices are at 7-year highs, and Biden can't do much about it
All of this is leading to sticker shock for many Americans filling up at the pump -- at a time of the year when gas prices typically cool off. The national average price for gasoline hit a fresh seven-year high of $3.27 a gallon on Monday, up by 7 cents in the past week alone, according to AAA. Gas has nearly doubled since bottoming at $1.77 in April 2020.
High gas prices will only exacerbate elevated inflation, squeeze the budgets of American families and hurt President Joe Biden's political fortunes.
Unfortunately, prices at the pump may get lifted even higher by the global energy crisis.
Natural gas prices have skyrocketed so much, especially in Europe and Asia, that power plants and factories may increasingly turn to a relatively cheaper fuel source for electricity: crude oil.
"It's a case of just trying to keep the lights on," said Matt Smith, Kpler's lead oil analyst for the Americas. "This is essentially creating demand that typically isn't there,"
$100 oil in the cards?
Citigroup on Monday ramped up its Brent oil forecast to $85 a barrel for the fourth quarter and said crude will likely hit $90 at times. The Wall Street bank cited "price contagion this winter" and the expected switching of power plants away from sky-high natural gas to oil.
Citi added that a "very cold winter" could see Europe "running out of gas" by February.
Oil has long been there as a potential substitute for natural gas -- except until recently, it didn't make any financial sense. That's because for much of the past dozen years, natural gas prices have been very low, making switching to oil uneconomical.
A global energy crisis is coming. There's no quick fix
But in Europe, natural gas prices have gone from below $2 per million BTU last year to as much as $55 this fall. That is the equivalent of $320 a barrel oil.
Bank of America has warned that a cold winter could boost oil demand by half a million barrels per day, lifting Brent crude to $100 a barrel. That in turn would cause more sticker shock for American drivers because gas prices are priced off Brent crude.
"We may just be one storm away from the next macro hurricane," Bank of America strategists wrote in a recent note to clients.
Record coal prices in China
It's not just high natural gas prices that are playing a role here.
Chinese coal prices have hit record highs amid flooding in northern China that forced the closure of dozens of coal mines. Coal remains the main source of energy in China, used for heating, power generation and steelmaking. China is now grappling with power shortages, prompting the government to ration electricity during peak hours and some countries to suspend production.
Against this backdrop, gasoline prices have crept higher and higher in the United States -- adding to inflationary pressures gripping the economy.
Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, said $3.30 gas prices nationally are likely around the corner.
"Looking out on the horizon, I really don't see an organized drop in prices," said De Haan. "The market is starting to feel explosive. The fundamentals are there for that to continue."
OPEC in the driver's seat
While demand is strong, oil supplies have simply not kept pace.
US oil production has been slow to rebound from Covid -- even as prices have surged. Many US oil companies are leery of once again oversupplying the market and they are far more focused on returning cash to shareholders who have lost gobs of money over the past decade.
Despite the White House's calls for OPEC and its allies to significantly ramp up production, the group has only gradually increased output sidelined in early 2020. For now, they seem content to let oil prices remain elevated.
"They have always been the swing producer," said Kpler's Smith, "but my gosh they certainly hold the power right now."
Abstract
Recently reported insect declines have raised both political and social concern. Although the declines have been attributed to land use and climate change, supporting evidence suffers from low taxonomic resolution, short time series, a focus on local scales, and the collinearity of the identified drivers. In this study, we conducted a systematic assessment of insect populations in southern Germany, which showed that differences in insect biomass and richness are highly context dependent. We found the largest difference in biomass between semi-natural and urban environments (−42%), whereas differences in total richness (−29%) and the richness of threatened species (−56%) were largest from semi-natural to agricultural environments. These results point to urbanization and agriculture as major drivers of decline. We also found that richness and biomass increase monotonously with increasing temperature, independent of habitat. The contrasting patterns of insect biomass and richness question the use of these indicators as mutual surrogates. Our study provides support for the implementation of more comprehensive measures aimed at habitat restoration in order to halt insect declines.
The UK may not have enough biodiversity to prevent an ecological meltdown and is already one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries – according to new data.
The UK has an average of only 53 percent of its biodiversity left, well below the global average of 75 percent, according to analysis by the Natural History Museum released on Sunday.
Both figures are lower than the 90 percent average, which experts consider the “safe limit” to prevent the world from tipping into an “ecological recession”.
Variety
This in turn would result in a future in which ecosystems do not have enough biodiversity to function well, leading to crop failures and infestations that could cause shortages in food, energy and materials.
Biodiversity represents the variety of plant and animal life on Earth, and scientists say it is dwindling fast.
“Much of the world has lost a large amount of its natural biodiversity,” said Dr Adriana De Palma from the Natural History Museum.
“Those systems have lost enough biodiversity to mean that we have to be careful about relying on them functioning in the way that we need them to.”
Researchers at the museum have developed the Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII), which measures the percentage of nature that remains in an area.
Species
The UK’s 53 percent BII places it in the bottom 10 percent of the world’s countries and last among the G7 group of nations.
The UK’s long-time low position in the league table is linked to the industrial revolution, said Professor Andy Purvis from the Natural History’s life sciences department.
“That mechanised the destruction of nature to an extent, converting it into goods for profits,” he said.
The UK has seen relatively stable biodiversity levels over recent years, albeit at a “really low level,” Dr De Palma said.
While the country has seen some increases in the amount of high-quality natural vegetation that helps support native species, those gains have been offset by the expansion of cropland and urban areas, as well as population growth, she explained in a press briefing.
Targets
The UK can fix the problem, but “we’d hope from a global biodiversity perspective that that doesn’t come at the expense of just offshoring biodiversity damage to other places,” said Professor Purvis, who is a world-renowned expert on biodiversity metrics.
The team from the Natural History Museum hope their BII tool will help global leaders meeting for the UN Biodiversity Conference, known as COP15, next week.
The conference, hosted by China, is set to take place online on October 11-15, with a second round to be held in the city of Kunming next spring.
Negotiators are tasked with agreeing a new set of goals for nature over the next 10 years.
None of the world’s last targets for protecting wildlife, which were set in Aichi, Japan, in 2010, were met.
Worldwide decline
“This is our last best chance for a sustainable future,” Professor Purvis said of COP15.
He highlighted the need for action that recognises that developed countries have a stable but low level of biodiversity intactness, while developing countries have a high level that is decreasing fast – a “global levelling up.”
He said: “Biodiversity loss is just as potentially catastrophic for people as climate change, but the solutions are linked.
“Stopping further damage to the planet requires big change, but we can do it if we act now, together.
“Muddling through as we currently are doing is nowhere near enough to halt, let alone reverse, the ongoing worldwide decline in biodiversity.”
The political left in the US is a strange beast. I realize it doesn't exactly coincide with the left in Europe. I have lived mostly in the US. That is my frame of reference.
In you have heard of Ocasio-Cortes and her "Tax the Rich" stunt. It is a cheap political message; you can demand change and other people will pay for it. The idea that you can make corporations pay with no inpact onnconsumers is ridiculous. It simply a lie to avoid politicians having to make tough choices.
Show me a politician in the US who says gas and heating oil prices need to rise, and that politician has my respect.