Is the world being destroyed?

America is not a happy place. All of us are angry about something. We all feel the need to protest, and the litany of topics to protest against is long. When my husband said “we should go to the Capitol to protest this weekend,” I asked him what item we should protest about. I said there was a long list to choose from:

CLIMATE CHANGE: America has an abysmal record in tackling environmental issues. Extreme weather events are occurring on an almost daily basis, whether it be rising temperatures, fires, tornados, hurricanes, or floods. I’m glad we didn’t plan a trip to Yellowstone this summer because a large portion of it will remain closed. Oceans are heating up and deserts are dying. Ghost trees line up and down along the East Coast. Ocean conveyor belts are shutting down, and seas are heating up and acidifying. Marine life gobbles up microplastics like they are candy. Ice sheets are melting and oceans are rising. Soon, all coastal cities will be threatened with flooding and there won’t be enough FEMA or insurance money to go around. America is losing its trees to fires and the world is collectively losing its lungs to Amazon deforestation. Biodiversity is declining across the board, and soon there will be no bugs left for birds to eat. The ozone layer keeps depleting, but our government does little to keep pollution at bay — especially if the power of the EPA will be limited. Topsoil is eroding, bees are dying, and aridification is drying the planet out. Monoculture upsets the natural balance of soils, genetically modified foods are risky, and farm animals are loaded with antibiotics. Worldwide, famines are becoming more frequent and cities are running out of drinking water. Fracking contaminates aquifers and oil spills damage the ecosystem. Air pollution, acid rain, urban sprawl, and overpopulation are just a few modern day problems. Unrecycled plastics overflow waste dumps and we breathe their particulates into our lungs. Cryptocurrency mining uses huge amounts of power, and that power is getting harder and more expensive to create.

WATER CRISIS: The clock is ticking ever faster toward the day when a huge portion of this country will officially run out of water. We pretend that the inevitable will never happen, but doing so fools no one but ourselves. Lake Mead is nearing dead pool status which translates to a massive loss of power. Speaking of power, the country’s largest nuclear plant needs lots of water to keep it running, and that facility is located in a desert. Unfortunately, that same desert allocates much of its water to farms leased to Saudi Arabia. All across the country, rivers are drying up, reservoirs are evaporating, and salt water is contaminating the drinking water supply. Soon, water will be worth more than its weight in gold.

HEALTH CRISIS: America shouts that it has the “best healthcare in the world but it only whispers that most Americans can’t afford it. Insurance costs are astronomical for those that aren’t lucky enough to work for an employer that offers decent rates. Junk food is cheap, portion sizes are huge, and nowhere is walkable— thus Americans are generally obese. The fact that we are in our cars so much means that we are at higher risk for accidents. Fast food is loaded with chemicals and most food that we buy comes in carcinogenic packaging. Almost everything we eat is loaded with fat, salt, sugar, and chemically processed ingredients. The opioid crisis kills those who haven’t killed themselves due to mental health issues. America has given up on stopping COVID-19 from spreading, not that it tried to stop it in the first place. Long COVID remains a non-topic even though plenty of people suffer from it. Vaccines (of all kinds) are a source of contention and Big Pharma is not to be trusted. America is not the best country to grow old in because end-of-life care is not about caring for the elderly but about making institutions lots and lots of money.

HOUSING: Plain and simple, it is becoming unaffordable to live in America. Greed has infiltrated the housing market, and there is hardly anywhere affordable left to live. Slave wages keep Americans poor, yet rents keep increasing at astronomical rates. Corporations outcompete residents in the housing market and Airbnb’s keep many properties empty when they are not being rented by visitors. Mortgage rates are going up but housing prices are not going down. No one builds starter homes anymore for everything is either luxury condos or oversized McMansions. Many communities have high HOA fees, high energy rates, high insurance rates, and high property taxes. Those who are homeless are either ignored or arrested, depending on where they pitch their tent.

ECONOMY: “It’s the economy, stupid” was a phrase coined during the Clinton campaign but I’d say that it has taken on new meaning. I would rephrase it as, “it’s the stupid economy,” for this economy is on the road to tanking. Inflation, price gouging, and shortages are gravely concerning, but so is aging infrastructure, lack of industry, poverty, rising food and gas prices, and wondering whether or not welfare and social security will remain intact into the future. America’s energy future needs to go green if it wants to remain thriving, but even green energy comes at a cost and Americans aren’t buying it. It’s not that Americans are averse to spending money but more because Americans aren’t making much money to spend. The minimum wage remains pathetically low and creating unions remains notoriously difficult. Many live paycheck to paycheck and often within a gig economy that offers no benefits. Retirement is a pipe dream, savings is a myth, and renting will last forever (or for however long people can afford it).

EDUCATION: America’s education system is a joke. Teachers’ pay remains low, schools are underfunded, book banning and censorship are rising, teaching has become more restrictive, parents are interfering to a fault, and bullying goes unpunished. The pandemic kept kids away from school, but that hardly mattered because American kids have been bombing tests for years. Religious schools aren’t taxed, but they now qualify for governmental aid. On top of all this, students and teachers are at high risk of being murdered just for being in a classroom.

GUN VIOLENCE: America stands in a league of its own when it comes to owning guns, especially when guns have more rights than citizens. Seriously. Guns have more rights than females right now. Think about that. A woman’s body is more regulated than a gun. If that doesn’t say that America is broken, I don’t know what does. The gun violence in this country is atrocious, but it has the potential to get even worse. People own guns in the name of self-defense, but many of those guns get used for the wrong reasons.

POLICE: To say that America is a “police state” doesn’t even describe it: we are a “police country.” America has created a system where those in charge of us can not be held accountable for their actions. It is almost next to impossible to charge cops for the crimes they commit against us civilians. Cops can get away with doing anything, and they do. And they can get away with doing nothing, and they do. Americans recently lost recourse for not having their Miranda rights read to them and they recently established a 100-mile radius where they can infringe on our rights without a warrant. The prison system is a big money-making business and more laws are being created to increase everyone’s chances of landing in jail. Life becomes rough once one has a felony attached to it, for spending time in jail does not restore one’s stance as a citizen, but instead stains it. Having a felony takes away one’s right to vote as well as one’s chance to earn a decent wage. Once a felon, one stays as a felon, so a life of crime is practically their only option. One would think that doing the time would absolve the crime, but it doesn’t. The system needs a steady stream of criminals to keep it afloat.

WOMEN’S RIGHTS: Ya, America doesn’t have them. Women are officially second-class citizens now, and they rank somewhere below guns. It makes me want to throw up when I think that HALF of the citizens of this country lack equal rights. A woman’s body is no longer her own, depending on what STATE she lives in. There is a lot wrong with America, but if there is one thing that will finally break it, the anti-abortion law will deal the final blow. Banning abortions is so mind-blowingly senseless that I can barely wrap my head around it. America would rather let a woman die than allow her to make her own decisions. America would rather throw a physician in jail than allow that doctor to perform a life-saving procedure. Not all pregnancies are viable and they can often be incredibly risky. The pro-life argument isn’t about life at all; it’s purely about power and control over women. Also, there is talk about taking away access to contraception, which will also disproportionally affect women’s health. Many females take contraceptives to regulate their otherwise unpredictable and painful cycles. A woman’s body is her own. Period. America has so many problems to concern itself with but it has chosen to ignore them all. Instead, it decided to take away women’s rights as if they were its greatest threat to democracy. I’m calling bullshit.

LGBTQ RIGHTS: Ya, America won’t have those either soon. Allow me to quote Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas: “established gay rights should be reconsidered now that the federal right to abortion has been revoked…those rulings were demonstrably erroneous decisions.” I’m calling bullshit on this one, too. It is slowly becoming obvious that the only Americans that will be granted full rights will be male, white, and Christian. Like the old days. In the 1700s. Oh, and here’s a list of the history of violence against LGBT people in the United States to peruse at your leisure.

BLM RIGHTS: The fact that you gotta say “Black Lives Matter” means that Black Lives Haven’t Mattered. America has a track record of disenfranchising African Americans. The system is set up against them on purpose. They are what keeps the system going. They are the fuel that feeds the beast. They get the poorest jobs, the poorest pay, the poorest benefits, the poorest cities, the poorest care, the poorest everything. But, enough is enough. They are fighting back. Black Lives Do Matter. They matter very much. And they will keep saying “Black Lives Matter” over and over again until the system finally stops shooting them.

IMMIGRANTS: For a nation founded on immigrants, we sure don’t treat immigrants very well. Do you know who said this quote: “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.” I’ll tell you who said it: George Washington. The Supreme Court is all about taking this country back to the days of the original Constitution, so I guess that means that we’ll be nice to our immigrants now. Right? Nah. I bet that we’ll continue to keep our immigrants in holding tanks and cages like we have been.

TERRORISM: Terrorists don’t need to come from overseas, for we have plenty of homegrown varieties now. The FBI defines Domestic Terrorism as: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature. By this definition, I would call the Religious Right a terrorist group, along with White Supremacists. I’d group them along with Russian hackers and angry young men.

POLITICS: The American political system is broken. To say that it’s shattered into a thousand little pieces doesn’t describe it enough, for the system has been pulverized. The problem, of course, starts with the voting system itself. The Electoral College is an antiquated system that makes it so the popular vote doesn’t win. Gerrymandering manipulates the boundaries and restrictive voting laws are making it harder and harder for minorities to vote. America is consistently ruled by older white men who are out of touch with the times, but young people don’t run because they don’t have the money. Only the rich can afford to be politicians, and many of them bribe their way into positions. America’s laws are decided by lobbyists and corporations, so we are a “democracy” in name only. The Supreme Court has been highjacked by Christian zealots, and there is no longer a separation of church and state. Nationalism and Fascism is a slippery slope, and America teeters on top of the slide. The poor are taxed more than the rich, and most of that money goes toward wars we will never win. Politicians say lies on campaign trails simply to get elected, and once elected, they never ask citizens what it is they actually want. Voters are used like rags — we’re useful only to clean up their slime. Also: Theocracy. That’s where we’re heading now.

WEALTH DISPARITY: CEOs and Billionaires suck. There is no other way to say it. It would be one thing if they did something good with all their money, but they don’t. Instead, they build rocket ships and blast themselves halfway to the moon.

WAR: Russia is not just Ukraine’s problem. Russia has nukes and they might use them. The fact that Ukraine is not part of NATO means that the world has to sit back and watch them die. Oh, and Israel and Palestine are two nations that should live nowhere near each other, just saying.

TEXAS: This state is a category unto itself. Texas is threatening to secede and I’m at the point of saying “let them.” They are making such extreme laws that it makes me not want to be an American anymore. Their influence scares me and it’s making me realize that we are no longer a “United States of America” but a divided one.

SPACE: Unfortunately, space is not the answer. Sorry, but there is no getting off this planet. Besides, even if we try to leave, a chunk of space junk would probably hit our rocket ship and cause loads of damage. Mars is too far away, and we’d all be blind by the time we’d arrive there. So, Earth is where we all need to stay, and we better start figuring out ways to make this planet livable. If not, the DOOMSDAY CLOCK will count down its final 100 seconds before exploding.

CONCLUSION: I want to be positive, but I can’t help to feel negative about America’s future. I want to think that we can vote, petition, and protest our way out of this mess, but I’m beginning to doubt that it’s possible. The Supreme Court bombed this country back to the 1700s, and it will take every state one by one to bring us back into the present century. Of course, state elections matter more now than they ever did, but the truth is that we are on our way toward a Balkanized nation. I want to live in the America I thought I was born into, but that America is sadly gone. Voting our way out of this mess may not be the solution we think it is given the track record of politicians, so dividing the country may be the best answer we are looking for. However, dividing the country only solves 0.001% of our problems. We need to find solutions to every problem that was mentioned, and that list is impossibly too long to tackle. So, maybe collapse is inevitable. It may just be that “America” has finally run its course.

The money-grifting meme-king is at it again.

Not content to just grab taxpayer money by the billions, evade taxes, shill pyramid schemes, and lose hundreds of billions in investor capital — Tesla is down $220 billion since we published this article, and still has another $700 billion to go — oligarch Elon Musk thinks he knows the biggest danger to civilization.

It also might be the dumbest thing he’s ever tweeted, and that’s saying a lot:



Obviously, this tweet is hyperbole in the extreme.

There are quite literally thousands of bigger dangers to civilization, including:

• Corporations resetting the global economy to feudalism
• Lack of freshwater
• Droughts and famines causing mass starvation
• Corporations continuing to cause crushing price inflation
• Global roasting
• Institutional investors pushing the average house price to $10 million, causing mass rent-serfdom
• Corporations using robots and automation to create a global jobs crisis
• A killer superbug paired with rabid anti-vaxxers

You get the idea.

The greatest threat to civilization clearly isn’t having slightly fewer humans.

What’s truly astounding is that Elon Musk probably actually believes this little planet is underpopulated.

But the science and math are clear:

He couldn’t be more wrong.

Small world

Having personally visited forty countries and taken an around-the-world journey, I’m here to report that planet Earth is outrageously tiny for the number of homo sapiens who now extract its diminishing resources.

Earth has just 36.79 billion acres of land… divided by ten billion people, it’s just 3.7 acres per person —under two soccer fields to supply all our oxygen, air filtration, soil, food, water, clothing, shoes, houses, furniture, mining, cars, trains, planes, offices, iPhones, and still leave room for the 1.74+ million other species with whom we share the planet and with whom we are deeply interconnected to ensure our mutual long-term survival. It’s not nearly enough to live naturally and sustainably.

Cue the technology worshipers: “But magical future technologies will save us!”

First of all, no they won’t, because all that tech will be corporate-owned and will require shareholder profits, which require an ever-expanding customer base.

Second, that magical future technology is already way too late. We are already way past sustainability. If we didn’t add another single human being to this planet and kept on our current trajectory, we will run out of natural food, fuel, clean air, clean water, and living soil.

Third, we have no idea about the longest-term impacts of these new technologies. For instance, there is a very good chance that Venture Capital Veganism will destroy the planet and human health. Here’s another example: Haber-Bosch. This is the technological process by which we affix nitrogen into the soil via fertilizer.

It’s also horrible for the planet.

Nicknamed “the detonator of the population explosion”, it allowed the human population to soar from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 8 billion today, while “leaching of nitrates into groundwater, rivers, ponds, and lakes; expanding dead zones in coastal ocean waters, resulting from recurrent eutrophication; atmospheric deposition of nitrates and ammonia affecting natural ecosystems; [and] higher emissions of nitrous oxide.”

Without Haber-Bosch, we’d only be able to sustainably feed a maximum of three billion people organically and naturally, to say nothing of how we’d organically and naturally heat, house, clothe, and power them all.

Do we really want to keep betting on risky technologies just so we can push the human population past 10,000,000,000 on this tiny planet?

But America’s population is falling!

This is another very bad argument that Elon Musk makes — that we need to continue to overpopulate a 3X over-populated planet because America only birthed 3,659,289 babies last year.

In other words, he distracts his herd of sheeple from realizing the rest of the world still exists.

It’s also important to note that Elon’s use of the phrase “population collapse” is a total misdirection.

Not a single prediction chart sees us dropping from ten billion to, say, one billion, in the coming century. A leveling out and a tiny deflation over many generations is not a collapse. That’s called fearmongering.

The overpopulationists are also cherry-picking data.

If you look at the actual UN predictions, they give a range of numbers: While falling fertility rates could ease us back to 7 billion, they also see a future in which we hit 16.5 billion within 79 years. (There’s nothing to say we won’t see population growth rates pick back up again if we continue to see continuing declines in wealth, health, democracy, freshwater, soil nutrition, women’s rights, and education.)

The UN’s best middling guess? 11 billion.

Either way, the idea that we should continue adding billions of people to our already-overtaxed planet because we might see declines in the future is, frankly, a preposterous notion.

If your house is on fire, do you add more wood before starting to put out the flames?

Any meaningful population declination isn’t going to happen in our lifetime. We’re on track to grow to at least ten billion, potentially even twelve by the century’s end, before we crest and trend slowly back toward sustainability. But we don’t have 100 years. Each generation’s job is to deal with the challenges in their time, and ours is a collapsing ecosystem caused by overpopulation.

We need to talk about robots

Hyper-capitalists like Elon Musk love to fear-monger about the tiny-but-not-happening-in-our-lifetime population deflation-toward-sustainability while they simultaneously automate away current human jobs.

In addition to autonomous (read: people-free) factories, Elon Musk is even investing in humanoid robots to replace workers.

Corporatists hate homo sapien workers, of course —humans usually want living wages, safe working conditions, and basic human rights like healthcare.

Corporatists, on the other hand, want fully-obedient slaves who will work 24/7 so they can maximize quarterly profits.

This financial tension is why corporated investment in automation is expected to destroy or disrupt up to two billion jobs in the next ten years alone.

In other words, Elon is simultaneously evangelizing…

Robots will do everything! (And therefore put everyone out of work.)

And also…

We don’t have enough people! (Who will all be suffering and starving anyway.)

So which is it?

Either he’s lying about fake underpopulation or he’s overselling (read: lying) about the pace of technological innovation.
The back story

Why did Elon broadcast such a dumb statement about overpopulation?

Well, according to court documents, he secretly fathered twins with one of his employees, bringing his overpopulation efforts to ten children by multiple women.

In other words, an unhinged billionaire is publicly congratulating himself for cheating on his wife and creating two more children who will grow up with extremely limited father-child time.

This is evil.

This is pure narcissism.

The truth about Elon Musk’s tweet

Elon Musk is gaslighting humanity into believing his distorted view of reality.

The real reason why Silicon Valley billionaire-types are worried about depopulation is that their insane nearly-rules-free-market corporate capitalism business model require aggressive exponential growth forever, and sees humans as customers in an ever-growing pyramid scheme.

The reality is that when automation and AI take over the way Elon says it will, we’ll be begging for a real population collapse, because otherwise, we’ll have billions upon billions of “economically unviable” people desperately fighting to survive.

Based on our current trajectory, does anyone believe the average person is going to be better off fifty years from now, in a 10+ billion person world where billionaires control the global economy, unemployment is rampant, no one owns a home, rent prices leave 3+ billion in slums, corporatists have privatized healthcare and education, and the working class has sunk back into serfdom?

As we add 2+ billion people to a planet that is already 5+ billion overpopulated, and continue to privatize, financialize, and automate everything for corporate profits, we will have a world with significantly more human suffering.

As Edward Abbey said:

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Elon Musk says a collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces.

He’s wrong.

A slowing birth rate is the greatest threat to corporate profits.

Sustainability is the greatest threat to Elon Musk’s colossal unearned wealth. He wants the earth to be miserably overpopulated as a forcing function to push the world to invest in becoming a multi-planet species.

His equation for personal abundance = natural resources + privatized technology + economic exploitation + increasing population + magical thinking (that humans can sustainably live in space within our lifetime.)

This is a recipe for civilization-scale suffering.

Luckily, biological facts and economic reality don’t care what Elon Musk tweets:

Superabundance for all = nature + democratized technology + democratized investment - economic exploitation - population.

But Elon doesn’t care about mere Earthlings.

His head is far too high in the clouds.

Wherever scientists have recently searched for fine plastic particles, they have found them. For example, in people's livers - and previously in other organs as well. Or in every corner of the continents and oceans: on Mount Everest in the Himalayas as well as in the Mariana Trench, where divers found a plastic bag at a depth of almost 11,000 metres.

Now a team of researchers from the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung, the Frankfurt Goethe University and the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Bremerhaven has also looked at other areas of the deep sea. The result: the seabed is even more polluted with microplastics than previously assumed.

The team had taken sediment samples in the western Pacific Kuril-Kamchatka Trench metres in 2016. Between 215 and 1596 of the tiny plastic particles were detected per kilogram of sediment, which was more than previously, the Senckenberg Society reported. The great biodiversity on the deepest seabed is severely endangered by the pollution.

Human footprints at hadal depths: interlayer and intralayer comparison of sediment cores from the Kuril Kamchatka trench

Internal documents explain why oil and gas interests would benefit from a key Indigenous declaration being ‘defeated’

A US-based libertarian coalition has spent years pressuring the Canadian government to limit how much Indigenous communities can push back on energy development on their own land, newly reviewed strategy documents reveal.

The Atlas Network partnered with an Ottawa-based thinktank – the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) – which enlisted pro-industry Indigenous representatives in its campaign to provide “a shield against opponents”.

Atlas, which has deep ties to conservative politicians and oil and gas producers, claimed success in reports in 2018 and 2020, arguing its partner was able to discourage the Canadian government from supporting a United Nations declaration that would ensure greater involvement by Indigenous communities.


Atlas and MLI have for years been pushing back against attempts by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to align Canadian laws with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), a declaration Canada endorsed more than a decade ago. That could have codified Indigenous rights to reject pipelines or drilling, the Atlas Network feared, according to their strategy documents, which were shared with Floodlight by an investigative climate research organization called DeSmog.

We’re Not Going to Make it to 2050

The Age of Extinction Is Dawning by the Day — And We’re Doing Too Little Too Late to Stop It



There’s a brutal truth that I think we’re all going to have to contend with.

Take a look out there at the world. How do you think things are going?

Europe’s on fire. The continent. Fires stretch from France, through Spain and Portugal, to Greece. The temperature’s hit 45 degrees Celsius. Weary firefighters are trying to put out the blazes. Stories abound of families and vacationers fleeing for dear life.

In London, meanwhile, the government has issued its first ever national emergency over…the temperature. It’s going to hit 40 degrees Celsius, maybe more. A lot of people are going to die. This being Brexit Britain, a place basking in stupid Darwinian glory — nobody much cares. But Britain’s hardly the kind of nation prepared for extreme heat. This is summer now. A time of killing heat.

In America? The West is running out of water. Lake Mead and Shasta Lake are running dry. They’re projected to hit the breaking point in 2025. That’s two years away. This system is headed for catastrophic failure. Because of it, entire cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix exist. It sustains California’s agriculture, which is America’s breadbasket. When it goes?

Then there’s the East. Through Iran and the Indian Subcontinent, the hottest temperatures on earth are being recorded. There, people are lucky to have electricity for 12 hours a day.

All that, though? It’s only the beginning.

Did I mention the pandemic? YACW? Yet Another Covid Wave? We’ll come back to that one.

Because of the killing heat, crops are beginning to fail. What kinds of crops? The better answer is: what isn’t on the list? Harvests for everything from cocoa to coffee to wheat to sugar to mustard are beginning to decline. They’re not going to stop, because neither is the heat. The crops our civilization depends on? They can’t survive the killing heat, either. So what happens as harvests fail?

Prices spike. Shortages break out. Both of those are beginning to happen now. My lovely wife’s back in America — I’m in Europe. She calls me daily to tell me how fast prices are rising. I commiserate, and tell her that Europe’s on fire. This is our daily catch-up chit chat.

In an Age of Extinction.

What happens as prices spike? Inflation roars. And what happens as a consequence of inflation? People get poorer. What do people who are getting poorer not have the money to do anymore? Invest. They can’t afford to pay the taxes which fund modern social contracts. And so societies simply begin to fall apart. This is the vicious cycle many, many civilizations have fallen into before us, essentially. Poverty breeds an inability to take collective action and make collective investments. All the systems of a golden age? They simply begin to crumble, break down, fail — and now there’s nothing much left over to repair them, because people are just fighting for basics, a little more bitterly every day.

Sound like the path we’re on? It should, because it is.

What’s the brutal truth I’m trying to get to? It goes like this. We’re not going to make it to 2050. Not even close to that far.

By “make it,” I don’t mean…some kind of dumb Marvel Movie. We’re all going to die tomorrow! Nope. I mean “Civilization as we know it.” I mean that things are going to collapse much, much faster and harder than we think. Isn’t that already the case? That’s the trend which every clear thinking person should understand very, very intently right about now.

Take a hard look at right now. Do you really think our civilization’s going to survive another three decades of this? Skyrocketing inflation, growing shortages, runaway temperatures, killing heat, failing harvests, shattered systems, continents on fire, masses turning to lunacy and theocracy and fascism as a result?

Seriously? Another three decades? Where every summer is that much worse than this one?

Let’s be real for a moment.

Why do I pick 2050? That’s the date that, so far, our efforts to fight “climate change” are centered around. The nations of the world have gotten together and chosen 2050 as the date to hit “net zero,” meaning that’s when carbon emissions are planned to be balanced out.

It’s a nice goal. It’s not a bad one. There’s just one problem. We’re not going to make it to 2050.

Why not?

The temperature’s already rising so fast that most models didn’t expect it to get this hot until 2050. So how hot is going to be in 2050? Actually, forget that. 2040. No, forget even that. Let’s just try…2030. We’re already at 45 degrees Celsius in Europe. 50 degrees in Asia. That’s for a few days here and there. At this rate? By 2030, that’s not just a few days anymore — it’s weeks at a time, maybe, spells of weeks at a time. What happens then?

A lot of things do. Megafires start, and don’t go out. Today’s crop failures are that much worse. Systems begin to shatter, and the drought America’s West faces is more or less everywhere that’s not lucky enough to be right next to some kind of permanently self replenishing water source. Inflation spikes even harder than now as a result of all this, and people can’t afford the basics, so taxes have to be cut, which means that…there’s nothing left over to invest in the very systems we need to fight all the above.

Bang. Collapse.

I’m not saying that will happen by 2030. LOL. Maybe you missed my point. I’m saying that’s already happening.

Now imagine 2040. Pandemics, which are a trend, an effect of extinction — as animals and humans rub shoulders — go right on accelerating. Covid never went away. It kept on mutating, and new kinds of poxes emerged, too. Then there are the crop failures, shortages, system failures, inflation. Then there’s the demagoguery and fascism. And atop all that, the animals have begun to die off now in serious ways — and so all that depends on them is starting to fail, too. The fish aren’t there to clean the rivers, which now run backwards, as the sea invades them. The insects aren’t there to turn the soil. What happens then?

The problem here is the same. Collapse is happening faster and harder than we imagined it would. Than the models said it would. Than the pundits who denied it would ever happen said it could. Than the theories imagined it should. Than the general cultural expectation — still mired in denial and it-can’t-happen-here-ism — allowed the possibility of it.

Temperatures are rising faster than models predicted. Nations like America are imploding faster than anyone much can believe. Animals are fleeing to the poles. Species are dying off at horrific rates. Glaciers are melting, fires are burning, storms are brewing, pandemics just keep going…more and harder than was predicted or expected.

The worst case scenario keeps on coming true. That is because we are not a civilization living according to a precautionary principle: hope for the best, maybe, but plan for the worst. At least have some kind of rudimentary contingency plan, if things really get that bad. Because that bad is existential. Have something in the cupboard. Have something saved up for a rainy day. We’re just sitting here, deer in the headlights of the apocalypse.

Our entire civilization’s efforts to combat the Event which will define history forevermore — Extinction, the sixth one in deep history, the last one being the Permian, which wiped out 96% percent of all marine species — boil down, so far, to just this. Let’s hit net zero by 2050, guys!! It’s not enough. It not enough fast enough, either. We’re not going to make it to 2050. What’s going to be left by 2050 is a smoking ruin of what was once a civilization, ravaged by pandemics, incinerated by megafires, desperately seeking salvation in theocracy and waging bitter wars, fascism pitting neighbors at one another’s throats, like in America, a thing of shattered systems and institutions, a mere haunted memory of a civilization.

Let me put that in less poetic terms. Our civilization, our societies? They’re beginning to struggle to provide the basics now. Water, clean air, energy, food, your house not being incinerated today. That’s right now. Three more decades of this? Getting worse by the season, month, day? They won’t have any functioning systems left. At that point — long before then, in fact, probably sometimes around the mid 2030s — our civilization will not be able to provide the basics at all. Chronic shortages of everything from food to water to medicine to electricity will be normal, as will all the effects of such shortages, from inflation to political instability to a collapse in social bonds and trust.

We are a civilization struggling to provide the basics right now. We are definitely not going to make it to 2050.

Everybody should understand this. Not to despair. But to realise that what we are doing as a civilization is inadequate. It is not nearly enough. To combat Extinction. How could it be? Extinction — the Event we’re now entering — is going to be the single greatest occurrence in human history. We have never experienced anything remotely like it in the 300,000 years we’ve existed, because the last time it happened was 65 million years ago. Extinction will cleave time, shape politics, and define culture forevermore, after us. Our progeny will regard us the way we regard Stone Age people, or maybe medieval sorts — why didn’t they do anything, they’ll wonder? Why did they sit there glued to dumb Marvel Movies and debating pronouns and letting demagogues scapegoat and hate…while their planet died?

What we are doing is inadequate. You don’t have to think too hard about it. Our civilization’s attempts to combat Extinction so far have resulted in…this. This dystopia we currently live in, where Europe’s on fire, inflation’s spiking, Covid never goes away, and all the rest of it. Our efforts are self-evidently inadequate. Things are this bad right now. Go ahead, and think about 2025. And shudder. Most of us can’t even imagine the world in 2030, or 2040. Will there even be one? What will be left of this thing we once called civilization?

Vague goals to hit “net zero” by 2050 are like standing in the basement of a burning house, and agreeing to call the fire department in the morning. Sure, they might put out the fire. But you won’t have a house, and you’ll be dead. It’s not good enough, and it’s not going to work.

We need to act now. What needs to be done? What an exasperating question. You know what needs to be done — pundits have just taught you to play dumb. We all know what needs to be done. We need a massive, massive wave of investment, now. To rebuild systems that are failing. Systems, this time, that last for a millennia. To figure out how to get clean water, clean energy, steel, iron, cement, fertilizer, without fossil fuels. We need to invest in a pan-Covid vaccine, and keep the next ones at bay. We need agricultural systems that can survive the killing heat. We need to give everyone on planet earth an education, an income, healthcare, to prevent tomorrow’s fascisms, pandemics, demagogues. We need whole new sectors, careers, jobs — what do you call someone that brings an ecosystem back to life? That figures out how to save a dying species? Who guards and protects an ocean, river, forest?

We need to do all this stuff. Pundits and leaders are clowns. They’re sitting there overthinking it, so that they have an excuse for inaction. But do you enjoy living in the 2020s? Like the megafires, inflation, never-ending pandemic, demagogues, lunatics, heat? Go ahead and tell me you want more of this. That’s what I thought. Nobody sane does. There’s no need to overthink it.

We all know what needs to be done. What’s missing is the will. The left is too busy debating pronouns to care about the fate of life on the planet. The center is too busy terrified of the right — and too busy laughing at the left — to lift a finger to save much of anything. The right, meanwhile, has figured out that scapegoating vulnerable groups is a magic spell that enchants working classes even more effectively than Marvel Superheroes in dumb outfits. And so we’re going nowhere. Watching all this, young people are in a state of paralytic shock, tuned out and burned out.

It’s not good enough.

Everyone should understand. We’re not going to make it to 2050. Until and unless we change. Demand better. Alter our own societies, habits, attitudes, expectations. Transform our social contracts and economies and polities. Stop overthinking, cowering, debating, and get it done. Begin doing what we all know needs to be done — sure, there are a few lunatics who’ll still “debate” it. But the rest of us know.

It’s now or never, my friends.

According to a new U.S. Army report, Americans could face a horrifically grim future from climate change involving blackouts, disease, thirst, starvation and war. The study found that the US military itself might also collapse. This could all happen over the next two decades, the report notes.

The senior US government officials who wrote the report are from several key agencies including the Army, Defense Intelligence Agency, and NASA. The study called on the Pentagon to urgently prepare for the possibility that domestic power, water, and food systems might collapse due to the impacts of climate change as we near mid-century.

The report was commissioned by General Mark Milley, Trump's new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, making him the highest-ranking military officer in the country (the report also puts him at odds with Trump, who does not take climate change seriously.)

The report, titled Implications of Climate Change for the U.S. Army, was launched by the U.S. Army War College in partnership with NASA in May at the Wilson Center in Washington DC. The report was commissioned by Gen. Milley during his previous role as the Army’s Chief of Staff. It was made publicly available in August via the Center for Climate and Security, but didn't get a lot of attention at the time.

The two most prominent scenarios in the report focus on the risk of a collapse of the power grid within “the next 20 years,” and the danger of disease epidemics. Both could be triggered by climate change in the near-term, it notes.

“Increased energy requirements” triggered by new weather patterns like extended periods of heat, drought, and cold could eventually overwhelm “an already fragile system.”

The report also warns that the US military should prepare for new foreign interventions in Syria-style conflicts, triggered due to climate-related impacts. Bangladesh in particular is highlighted as the most vulnerable country to climate collapse in the world.

“The permanent displacement of a large portion of the population of Bangladesh would be a regional catastrophe with the potential to increase global instability,” the report warns. “This is a potential result of climate change complications in just one country. Globally, over 600 million people live at sea level.”

Sea level rise, which could go higher than 2 meters by 2100 according to one recent study, “will displace tens (if not hundreds) of millions of people, creating massive, enduring instability,” the report adds.

The US should therefore be ready to act not only in Bangladesh, but in many other regions, like the rapidly melting Arctic—where the report recommends the US military should take advantage of its hydrocarbon resources and new transit routes to repel Russian encroachment.

But without urgent reforms, the report warns that the US military itself could end up effectively collapsing as it tries to respond to climate collapse. It could lose capacity to contain threats in the US and could wilt into “mission failure” abroad due to inadequate water supplies.

Total collapse of the power grid

The report paints a frightening portrait of a country falling apart over the next 20 years due to the impacts of climate change on “natural systems such as oceans, lakes, rivers, ground water, reefs, and forests.”

Current infrastructure in the US, the report says, is woefully underprepared: “Most of the critical infrastructures identified by the Department of Homeland Security are not built to withstand these altered conditions.”

Some 80 percent of US agricultural exports and 78 percent of imports are water-borne. This means that episodes of flooding due to climate change could leave lasting damage to shipping infrastructure, posing “a major threat to US lives and communities, the US economy and global food security,” the report notes.

At particular risk is the US national power grid, which could shut down due to “the stressors of a changing climate,” especially changing rainfall levels:

“The power grid that serves the United States is aging and continues to operate without a coordinated and significant infrastructure investment. Vulnerabilities exist to electricity-generating power plants, electric transmission infrastructure and distribution system components,” it states.

As a result, the “increased energy requirements” triggered by new weather patterns like extended periods of heat, drought, and cold could eventually overwhelm “an already fragile system.”

The report’s grim prediction has already started playing out, with utility PG&E cutting power to more than a million people across California to avoid power lines sparking another catastrophic wildfire. While climate change is intensifying the dry season and increasing fire risks, PG&E has come under fire for failing to fix the state’s ailing power grid.

The US Army report shows that California’s power outage could be a taste of things to come, laying out a truly dystopian scenario of what would happen if the national power grid was brought down by climate change. One particularly harrowing paragraph lists off the consequences bluntly:

“If the power grid infrastructure were to collapse, the United States would experience significant:

• Loss of perishable foods and medications
• Loss of water and wastewater distribution systems
• Loss of heating/air conditioning and electrical lighting systems
• Loss of computer, telephone, and communications systems (including airline flights, satellite networks and GPS services)
• Loss of public transportation systems
• Loss of fuel distribution systems and fuel pipelines
• Loss of all electrical systems that do not have back-up power”

Although the report does not dwell on the implications, it acknowledges that a national power grid failure would lead to a perfect storm requiring emergency military responses that might eventually weaken the ability of the US Army to continue functioning at all: “Relief efforts aggravated by seasonal climatological effects would potentially accelerate the criticality of the developing situation. The cascading effects of power loss… would rapidly challenge the military’s ability to continue operations.”

Also at “high risk of temporary or permanent closure due to climate threats” are US nuclear power facilities.

There are currently 99 nuclear reactors operating in the US, supplying nearly 20 percent of the country’s utility-scale energy. But the majority of these, some 60 percent, are located in vulnerable regions which face “major risks” including sea level rise, severe storms, and water shortages.

Containment

The report's authors believe that domestic military operations will be necessary to contain future disease outbreaks. There is no clear timeline for this, except the notion of being prepared for imminent surprises: “Climate change is introducing an increased risk of infectious disease to the US population. It is increasingly not a matter of ‘if’ but of when there will be a large outbreak.”

Areas in the south of the US will see an increase in precipitation of between .5 and .8 mm a day, along with an increase in average annual temperatures of 1 to 3 degrees Celsius (C) by 2050.

Along with warmer winters, these new conditions will drive the proliferation of mosquitos and ticks. This in turn will spur the spread of diseases “which may be previously unseen in the US”, and accelerate the reach of diseases currently found in very small numbers such as Zika, West Nile Virus, Lyme disease, and many others:

“The US Army will be called upon to assist in much the same way it was called upon in other disasters. Detailed coordination with local, state and federal agencies in the most high risk regions will hasten response time and minimize risk to mission.”

A new era of endless war

The new report is especially significant given the Trump administration’s climate science denial. Commissioned by General Mark Milley, now the highest ranking military officer in the United States, the report not only concludes that climate change is real, but that it is on track to create an unprecedented catastrophe that could lead to the total collapse of US society without serious investments in new technology and infrastructure. However, while focusing on projected climate impacts, the report does not discuss the causes of climate change in human fossil fuel emissions.

The report was written by an interdisciplinary team active across several US government agencies, including the White House’s Office of American Innovation, the Secretary of Defense’s Protecting Critical Technology Task Force, NASA’s Harvest Consortium, the US Air Force Headquarters’ Directorate of Weather, the US Army’s National Guard, and the US State Department. The US Army War College did not respond to a request for comment.

Their report not only describes the need for massive permanent military infrastructure on US soil to stave off climate collapse, but portends new foreign interventions due to climate change.

The authors argue that the Syrian civil war could be a taste of future international conflicts triggered by climate-induced unrest. There is “no question that the conflict erupted coincident with a major drought in the region which forced rural people into Syrian cities as large numbers of Iraqi refugees arrived,” they say.

The resulting conflict “reignited civil war in Iraq,” and heightened military tensions between the US and Russia.

“The Syrian population has declined by about 10 percent since the start of the war, with millions of refugees fleeing the nation, increasing instability in Europe, and stoking violent extremism,” the report concludes.

The most urgent case for a potential US intervention, however, is the South Asian country of Bangladesh.

With half its 160 million-strong population currently living at sea level, some 80 million Bangladeshis are set to be displaced as huge areas of the country become “uninhabitable” due to climate impacts: “How will this large scale displacement affect global security in a region with nearly 40 percent of the world’s population and several antagonistic nuclear powers?”

With a population eight times that of Syria’s, the report explains, “permanent displacement of a large portion of the population of Bangladesh would be a regional catastrophe with the potential to increase global instability.”

The authors recommend the US Army work with the State Department and USAID to “strengthen the resilience of [Bangladeshi] government agencies and provide training for the Bangladeshi military.”

Water scarcity will destabilize nations—and the U.S. Army

While sea level rise offers one specific type of risk, another comes from water scarcity due to climate change, population increase, and poor water management. The report describes water scarcity as a near-term risk driving civil unrest and political instability.

By 2040, global demand for fresh water will exceed availability, and by 2030 one-third of the world population will inhabit the “water-stressed regions” of North Africa, Southern Africa, the Middle East, China, and the United States, the report notes.

The decline in water availability over the next two decades will lead to an increase in “social disruption” in poor, vulnerable regions.

Water scarcity is also a driver of possible global food system failure, which could trigger new “outbreaks of civil conflict and social unrest.”

The report depicts a global food system increasingly disrupted by “rapid freeze-thaw cycles in spring and fall, soil degradation, depletion of fossil water aquifers, intensified spread of agricultural pests and diseases, and damage to shipping infrastructure as a consequence of flooding.”

Such food system instability will result in “significant increases in mortality in vulnerable locations, which are those where DoD-supported humanitarian intervention is most likely.”

But foreign military interventions, particularly in water scarce regions of the Middle East and North Africa, might not be viable unless the US Army invents or acquires radical new technologies to distribute adequate levels of water to soldiers.

The problem is so bad and so expensive, the report says, that the Army “is precipitously close to mission failure concerning hydration of the force in a contested arid environment.”

Water is currently 30-40 percent of the costs required to sustain a US military force operating abroad, according to the new Army report. A huge infrastructure is needed to transport bottled water for Army units. So the report recommends major new investments in technology to collect water from the atmosphere locally, without which US military operations abroad could become impossible. The biggest obstacle is that this is currently way outside the Pentagon’s current funding priorities.

Rampaging for Arctic oil

And yet the report’s biggest blind-spot is its agnosticism on the necessity for a rapid whole society transition away from fossil fuels.

Bizarrely for a report styling itself around the promotion of environmental stewardship in the Army, the report identifies the Arctic as a critical strategic location for future US military involvement: to maximize fossil fuel consumption.

Noting that the Arctic is believed to hold about a quarter of the world’s undiscovered hydrocarbon reserves, the authors estimate that some 20 percent of these reserves could be within US territory, noting a “greater potential for conflict” over these resources, particularly with Russia.

The melting of Arctic sea ice is depicted as a foregone conclusion over the next few decades, implying that major new economic opportunities will open up to exploit the region’s oil and gas resources as well as to establish new shipping routes: “The US military must immediately begin expanding its capability to operate in the Artic to defend economic interests and to partner with allies across the region.”

Senior US defense officials in Washington clearly anticipate a prolonged role for the US military, both abroad and in the homeland, as climate change wreaks havoc on critical food, water and power systems. Apart from causing fundamental damage to our already strained democratic systems, the bigger problem is that the US military is by far a foremost driver of climate change by being the world’s single biggest institutional consumer of fossil fuels.

The prospect of an ever expanding permanent role for the Army on US soil to address growing climate change impacts is a surprisingly extreme scenario which goes against the grain of the traditional separation of the US military from domestic affairs.

In putting this forward, the report inadvertently illustrates what happens when climate is seen through a narrow ‘national security’ lens. Instead of encouraging governments to address root causes through “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” (in the words of the UN’s IPCC report this time last year), the Army report demands more money and power for military agencies while allowing the causes of climate crisis to accelerate. It’s perhaps no surprise that such dire scenarios are predicted, when the solutions that might avert those scenarios aren’t seriously explored.

Rather than waiting for the US military to step in after climate collapse—at which point the military itself could be at risk of collapsing—we would be better off dealing with the root cause of the issue skirted over by this report: America’s chronic dependence on the oil and gas driving the destabilization of the planet’s ecosystems.

A baby green sea turtle rescued from a Sydney beach had eaten so much plastic that it took six days for the contents to be excreted, according to Taronga zoo’s wildlife hospital.
[...]
“It was all different sizes, colours and compositions. Some were hard, some were sharp, and with some, you could tell the plastic had writing on it. This is all some of these poor little things are eating. There’s so much plastic around they’re just consuming it as their first initial food,” ... ... ...

In 2021, global electric vehicle sales hit 6.6 million – more than double the 3 million in sales in 2020 — meaning EVs made up 9% of the global car market last year.

That’s the good news, from a decarbonization standpoint.

Here’s the bad news. Just as it begins to gain momentum, the electrification of transportation could begin stalling as early as mid-decade.

Starting around 2025, demand for key battery metals could start exceeding supply, adding costs to EV battery manufacturing, and putting the brakes on EV adoption, according to a new detailed analysis by S&P Global, The Future of Copper.

In fact, car manufacturers are already facing supply chain constraints for certain key metals, and are already resorting to substitution materials.

Ford Motor Co. (NYSE:F) announced this week it will switch to lower performance batteries for some of its EV vehicles, a move aimed at meeting production goals while addressing nickel supply issues. For some standard EV models, Ford will use lithium-iron-sulphate batteries, which don’t require nickel or cobalt.

Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warns a lithium shortage could start around 2025.

There was enough lithium mined in 2021 to supply 11.4 million EVs, according to the World Economic Forum.

If EV sales double again over the next couple of years, the EV market will already exceed the current global supply of lithium, unless new mines and refiners come into production by then. Llithium prices are up 380% from a year ago, according to Kitco.

But it’s copper that is the biggest worry, with the biggest driver of scarcity being the energy transition and increased EV demand, although the demand for more power transmission will also add strain to the supply of copper.

“Major investments in the power grid to support electrification will further amplify the trend,” the Future of Copper report notes.

“The 2050 climate objectives will not be achieved without a significant ramp-up in copper production in the near and medium term, which will be very challenging,” the S&P Global report warns.

A battery electric vehicle requires 2.5 times more copper than a standard internal combustion engine vehicle. Much of that is in the electric motor, some in the battery.

There simply aren’t enough copper mines being built or expanded to provide all the copper needed to produce the 27 million EVs that S&P Global has forecast to be sold annually by 2030.

“The chronic gap between worldwide copper supply and demand projected to begin in the middle of this decade will have serious consequences across the global economy and will affect the timing of Net-Zero Emissions by 2050,” the Future of Copper report warns.

Copper could rival oil as a national energy security concern for some countries.

“In the 21st century, copper scarcity may emerge as a key destabilizing threat to international security,” the report warns.

Under what it calls the High Ambition Scenario, S&P Global forecasts refined copper production would nearly double, from 24.5 million tonnes in 2021 to more than 47 million tonnes in 2035.

That still wouldn’t be enough.

“This results in chronic shortfalls between copper and supply demand beginning in 2025 and lasting through most of the 2030s, including a shortfall of more than 1.5 (million tonnes) in 2035 alone.

“But this scenario hinges on very significant increases in both capacity utilization and recycling rates. High Ambition is a highly optimistic scenario. What this scenario demonstrates is that, even at the outer edge of what could happen in copper mining and refining operations, there will not be enough supply to meet the demand identified for Net-Zero Emissions by 2050.”

A more dire forecast, which the report calls the Rocky Road Scenario, is for an annual supply shortfall of almost 10 million tonnes in 2035.

That is equivalent to the production of 75 copper mines the size of B.C.’s Highland Valley Copper mine – Canada’s largest – said Michael Goehring, president of the Mining Association of BC.

“Projects under development today would likely not be sufficient to offset the projected shortfalls in copper supply, even if their permitting and construction were accelerated,” the Future of Copper report notes.

Some of the metals used in batteries may be able to be substituted – iron replacing nickel, for example, in lithium-iron-phosphate batteries – said Matthew Klippenstein, former adviser for Plug In BC, and current executive director for Hydrogen BC.

“And Iron is really plentiful,” he notes.

But there really is no substitution for copper in electric cars. It is needed for the batteries, the wiring and the motors. Even if aluminum can become a substitute for copper, as has been suggested, that would just shift the need for more copper mining to more more bauxite mining and aluminum smelters.

Conservationists opposed to new copper or lithium mines may point to recycling as a solution. It’s not.

While a recycling and reuse industry for EV batteries will be needed, it won’t come anywhere close to supplying the necessary metals.

If the number of EVs on the road today remained static for the next 20 years, recycling the metals in them might be able to make up the bulk of the demand. But EV sales are growing exponentially.

There were 3 million electric cars sold globally in 2020, according to the IEA. That more than doubled in 2021 to 6.6 million. By 2030, S&P Global forecasts there will be nearly 27 million sold annually.

Assuming a battery life of 10 years (some may last as long as 20 years), even if every one of the 3 million batteries and motors sold in EVs in 2020 were to be recycled, that would provide only 11% of the metals needed in 2030 for 27 million electric cars.

The IEA estimates that recycling could meet only about 10% of the demand for battery materials in 2040.

Edward Chiang, CEO of B.C.’s Moment Energy, which repurposes EV batteries for use in stationary power storage, said there are serious challenges to EV battery recycling, mainly the cost, which is why his company repurposes them, rather than recycle the metals in them.

“Currently recycling (an EV battery) is an expensive process where North Americans are footing the bill,” Chiang said. “That’s why they’re charging people thousands of dollars for recycling. That’s why the stat is only 5% of all EV batteries are being recycled.”

The biggest market for used EV batteries may be in repurposing them in stationary storage applications, not recycling, according to McKinsey and Co.

An EV battery that is at 80% capacity may no longer be suitable for an electric car, but when they are stacked for stationary power storage, they are still perfectly useable and can last many more years.

“Reuse can provide the most value in markets where there is demand for batteries for stationary energy-storage applications that require less-frequent battery cycling,” says a McKinsey report from 2019.

“The math does not add up,” Chiang said. “Recycling is not the solution to EV demand. It’s going to help – 10%, 20% of the demand — but it’s not going to solve it. We’re still going to have to open up more mines and do better in refining clean processes to meet our EV production targets.”

While there is enough copper in the world, geologically speaking, to supply the increased demand, there isn’t enough time.

It takes 10 to 15 years to get a new copper mine through permitting and construction. Twenty years is not unusual for very large projects.

Goehring said B.C. has “significant potential” to increase copper production, and there are a couple of expansions, and two new mine proposals, in the pipeline.

B.C. is Canada’s biggest copper producer. But Canada is a minor producer compared to Chile, Peru, China and the U.S.

Canada’s total copper production was estimated at 475,898 tonnes in 2020, according to Natural Resources Canada, half of it from B.C. Chile’s is about 5.5 million tonnes annually, Peru 2.5 million tonnes, China 1.5 million tonnes.

Judging by the recent political tide shift in Chile, copper mining there could become more restricted. Chile’s new president, Gabriel Boric, has been busy in recent months rejecting new copper mines and expansions. Anglo American alone has had two copper mine expansions rejected just in the last couple of months.

In B.C., there are currently two mine expansion proposals that are close to having final investments decisions made, Goehring said – Highland Valley Copper and Red Chris — and two proposed new mines: the KSM gold-copper mine and the Galore Creek copper mine.

Whether they can be permitted and built in time to help address the looming copper crunch remains to be seen.

“Senior policymakers need to focus significant amount of attention on this,” Goehring said. “A credible and robust climate strategy needs to incorporate the supply side of critical metals.”

Abstract

Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such potential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe. Analyzing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanize action, improve resilience, and inform policy, including emergency responses. We outline current knowledge about the likelihood of extreme climate change, discuss why understanding bad-to-worst cases is vital, articulate reasons for concern about catastrophic outcomes, define key terms, and put forward a research agenda. The proposed agenda covers four main questions: 1) What is the potential for climate change to drive mass extinction events? 2) What are the mechanisms that could result in human mass mortality and morbidity? 3) What are human societies' vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk? 4) How can these multiple strands of evidence—together with other global dangers—be usefully synthesized into an “integrated catastrophe assessment”? It is time for the scientific community to grapple with the challenge of better understanding catastrophic climate change. (...)


Cascading global climate failure. This is a causal loop diagram, in which a complete line represents a positive polarity (e.g., amplifying feedback; not necessarily positive in a normative sense) and a dotted line denotes a negative polarity (meaning a dampening feedback).

(...)

Conclusion

There is ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic. We could enter such “endgames” at even modest levels of warming. Understanding extreme risks is important for robust decision-making, from preparation to consideration of emergency responses. This requires exploring not just higher temperature scenarios but also the potential for climate change impacts to contribute to systemic risk and other cascades. We suggest that it is time to seriously scrutinize the best way to expand our research horizons to cover this field. The proposed “Climate Endgame” research agenda provides one way to navigate this under-studied area. Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst.

New research shows that rainwater in most locations on Earth contains levels of chemicals that "greatly exceed" safety levels.

These synthetic substances called PFAS are used in non-stick pans, fire-fighting foam and water-repellent clothes.

Dubbed 'forever chemicals', they persist for years in the environment.

Such is their prevalence now that scientists say there is no safe space on Earth to avoid them.

The researchers from Stockholm University say it is "vitally important" that the use of these substances is rapidly restricted.

Scientists fear PFAS may pose health risks including cancer, though research has so far been inconclusive. They have been growing increasingly concerned about the proliferation of PFAS in recent years.

PFAS stands for poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances.

There are around 4,500 of these fluorine-based compounds and they are found in almost every dwelling on Earth in hundreds of everyday products including food packaging, non-stick cookware, rain gear, adhesives, paper and paints.

Safety concerns about the presence of these long-lasting substances in drinking water have also been raised.

Earlier this year a BBC investigation found PFAS in water samples in England at levels that exceeded European safety levels, but did not exceed the current safety level in England and Wales.

This new study, which looks at four specific chemicals in the class, suggests that levels of one PFAS in rainwater around the globe often "greatly exceed" US drinking water advisory levels.

Soil around the world is similarly contaminated, evidence suggests.

The study's findings lead the authors to conclude that a planetary boundary has been crossed - that there simply is no safe space on Earth to avoid these substances.

"We argue here that we're not within this safe operating space anymore, because we now have these chemicals everywhere, and these safety advisories, we can't achieve them anymore," said Prof Ian Cousins, the lead author from Stockholm University.

"I'm not saying that we're all going to die of these effects. But we're in a place now where you can't live anywhere on the planet, and be sure that the environment is safe."

While this is undoubtedly cause for concern, there are some provisos.

Many of these safety levels in place are advisory, meaning they are not legally enforceable.

Other scientists take the view that action on these chemicals should wait until the health risks are more clearly proven.

Much research has been carried out on the health risks posed by PFAS, and scientists say that exposure to high levels may be associated with an increased risk of some cancers, fertility issues and developmental delays in children.

However such associations don't prove cause and effect and other studies have found no connection between PFAS and disease.

But for those who have spent years working closely with PFAS, the evidence in the new research paper underlines the need for a precautionary approach.

"In this background rain, the levels are higher than those environmental quality criteria already. So that means that over time, we are going to get a statistically significant impact of those chemicals on human health," said Prof Crispin Halsall from the University of Lancaster. He was not involved with the Swedish study.

"And how that will manifest itself? I'm not sure but it's going come out over time, because we're exceeding those concentrations which are going to cause some harm, because of exposure to humans in their drinking water."

Removing the chemicals in the study from drinking water at treatment plants is possible, if expensive.

But getting below the US advisory levels is extremely challenging, according to the authors.

As scientists have gained more knowledge about PFAS over the past 20 years, the safety advisories have been continuously lowered.

The has also happened with regard to the presence of these chemicals in soil - and that too is causing problems.

In the Netherlands in 2018, the infrastructure ministry set new limits on concentrations of PFAS in soil and dredging material.

But this caused 70% of building projects involving soil removal or using excavated material to be halted. After protests, the government relaxed the guidelines.

According to the new study, this type of relaxation of safety levels is likely to happen with water contamination as well.

"If you applied those guidelines everywhere, you wouldn't be able to build anywhere," said Prof Ian Cousins.

"I think they'll do the same thing with the US drinking water advisories, because they're not practical to apply.

"It's not because there's anything wrong with the risk assessment. It's just because you can't apply those things. It's just impossible, from an economic viewpoint to apply any of those guidelines."

The key challenge with these chemicals is their persistence, rather than their toxicity, say the study authors.

While some harmful PFAS were phased out by manufacturers two decades ago, they persist in water, air and soil.

One way PFAS cycle through the environment is in the form of tiny particles carried in sea spray into the air and then back to land.

This inability to breakdown in the environment means that PFAS are now found even in remote areas of the Antarctic, as reported by Prof Halsall recently.

While there are moves at European level to restrict the uses of these chemicals and to find more benign replacements, there are also hopes that industry will quickly move away from using PFAS.

"We do need persistent chemicals and substances, we want our products to last a long time while we use them," said Prof Cousins.

"And while there are conservative voices in industry, there are progressive actors too. I'm very optimistic when I see these progressive industries working together."

Two-thirds of pledges to go greener on plastic fail or are dropped, a DW investigation has found. Here's how European food and drink companies break their own commitments, and how legislation might hold them accountable.

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Sometimes it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. We spend so much time on what’s in front of us, we can miss the bigger picture. Alarm bells are going off across the world. We need to hear them.

An extreme heatwave and drought has been roasting China for 70 days straight, something that “has no parallel in modern record-keeping in China, or elsewhere around the world for that matter.”

Next door, in Pakistan, a “torrential downpour of biblical proportions” has so far killed 900 people and destroyed nearly 100,000 homes. Its neighbour India has suffered 200 heatwave days this year so far, compared to just 32 last year. South Korea received it’s the heaviest hourly downpour in Seoul for 80 years, flooding the capital and leaving 50 cities and towns with landslide warnings.

The West has not been spared of course. The July heatwave that blanketed the US set 350 high temperature records across the country and killed more people than other extreme weather events such as floods and hurricanes. Europe is going through the worst drought in 500 years, and England has experienced the worst drought and heatwave since 1976. The expected thunderstorms just add to the sense of unpredictability.

These can’t all be coincidences. When was the last time our world was rocked by so many extreme weather events at the same time? Of course, it’s the impact of the climate crisis and just a sign of what’s to come.

The immediate impact will be felt on those affected by the heat, droughts and floods. But, just like a tsunami, there are bigger waves to come that will do far more damage.

China’s heatwave didn’t just destroy or damage large parts of its best farmland – it dried up hundreds of rivers, including parts of the Yangtze, the world’s third-largest river. That has put a halt to shipping and hydropower, and forced many companies to shut down. China will need to import large amounts of food and energy to make up for its shortfall, adding more stress to an already-stressed world.

The same problem has plagued Germany this summer as rivers have dried up, hitting transport, energy production, wildlife and farming. Sky-high energy prices in the meantime are already having a ruinous impact on businesses across the Eurozone and the world.

The alarm bells are going off everywhere. We can’t carry on ignoring them. The climate crisis won’t just be felt in heatwaves, droughts and floods – it will be felt through rocketing food, goods and energy prices. It will be felt through famines, water shortages and millions of people moving across the world to stave off hunger.

We are at a tipping point. Unless governments and companies are pushed to cut carbon emissions far quicker, the world as we know it will fall apart in front of our eyes. The speed at which a society can collapse – if basic goods such as food, water and energy become scarce – will shock us.

Forget 2030, or even net-zero in 2050, we cannot afford to wait that long. If we cannot heed those blaring sirens now, by the next time it will be too late.

Massive swathes of wilderness and the lives of billions of animals were extinguished into ash and smoke during Australia's Black Summer bushfires. The resulting haze suffocated major cities, triggered fatal health emergencies, and turned distant glaciers brown.

Now researchers have directly traced how some of this burnt biomass contributed to the largest stratospheric warming in three decades and also messed with the Antarctic ozone hole.

Combining satellite data with surface-based observations of aerosol behavior in computer models, University of Exeter statistician Lilly Damany‑Pearce and colleagues were able to detect the smoke as it floated high into our planet's atmosphere.

The fires consumed over 5.8 million hectares of life and were of such intense fury they formed their own weather systems, including smoke-infused thunderstorms (pyrocumulonimbus) that lasted for days on end.

As the researchers explain, these systems and their vortices pumped the smoke into remarkably high altitudes, with the Sun's rays heating the dark particles and causing them to rise further, in a process called self-lofting.

The first vortex, detected on 31 December 2019, reached an altitude of 16 kilometers (nearly 10 miles). Then another plume from 12 January 2020 was eventually detected up to 35 km into the sky – well into the stratosphere – and persisted for up to 2 months.

"Over the period of a month, the aerosol plume drifted across the South Pacific and was clearly detected in the stratosphere by [NASA instrument] CALIOP as well as surface-based lidars and sun-photometers operating from the southern tip of South America," the team writes in their paper.

During this time there was an abrupt global mean temperature spike in the stratosphere of 0.7 °C (1.8° F).

Anomalous temperatures persisted for four months, and the researchers' climate modeling demonstrated the temperatures could not be explained without the injected 0.81 teragrams of smoke particles the satellites detected in the stratosphere.

This was the largest temperature spike in Earth's stratosphere since the eruption of Pinatubo volcano in 1991, Damany‑Pearce and team note.

While the planet's surface cooled by about half a degree Celsius thanks to diffuse clouds of particles blocking sunlight, the absorption of infra-red radiation by particles in the stratosphere actually caused that layer of the atmosphere to warm significantly.

Aerosols from volcanoes released into the atmosphere from eruptions like this are also well known to deplete the ozone layer, and recent studies have shown particulates from wildfires can do this too.

Chemical reactions that take place on the surface of smoke particles use up ozone molecules. So the researchers mapped the vertical distribution of ozone in the southern hemisphere in 2020 and found more evidence of this smoke-induced ozone depletion.

The smoke particles wound up increasing the duration of the ozone hole over Antarctica and disrupted the Antarctic polar vortex, which usually begins to break down towards the end of spring.

"Ozone depletion serves to increase the strength of the polar vortex, via reduced stratospheric heating and thermal wind balance, providing a positive feedback that appears to delay the breakdown of the polar vortex," Damany‑Pearce and colleagues explain in their paper.

"This, in turn, contributed to the prolonged ozone hole that was observed in 2020."

The Antarctic ozone hole reached near record levels in 2020 and now we know why. The new research revealed how these smoke-induced changes then also impacted temperatures by strengthening the polar vortex. This led to the unusually cool Southern Hemisphere spring of 2020.

Meanwhile, closer to Earth's surface, more of the problematic smoke particles floated over the ocean and fell into the sea, spurring plankton into a feeding and reproductive frenzy that created a suffocating bloom of these microorganisms larger than the smoke's continent of origin.

Almost three years and several massive fires later, it's more concerning than ever to see what staggeringly large, varied and far-reaching ramifications massive plumes of wildfire smoke can have.