The other day, my little local coffee shop was the site of a heist. Think Ocean’s 2022. Only the victim? Me. Do you remember the scene where the little Chinese guy hang upside down from the ceiling and performs Shaolin acrobatics to filch the stuff straight out of the vault? $6 for a coffee. $8 for a goddamned croissant! $15 for a sandwich. What is this stuff made of, plutonium? Hey, little Chinese guy — get the hell out of my wallet!!
We bought a light lunch for 2. And left $50 poorer. It wasn’t exactly steak frites, with a caviar appetizer, followed by a sinfully indulgent gold-dusted chocolate explosion cake. It was just coffee and sandwiches. Wait, no, actually, it was a heist. I felt the way Bernie Madoff’s “investors” must have.
Good Lord. Have you been out there these days? It’s terrifying. The prices, I mean. It’s like the world’s richest man — a psychotic Jeff Bezos — is on a golden scooter, with a gigantic red marker, and marking up everything willy nilly to the point of insanity, stopping for a split second, laughing maniacally, and then revving off to mark up something else.
It is crazy. Looking at my bank account hurts, because this is the worst. Big expenses you can kind of handle, psychologically, you get an idea of the magnitude — but this? Five bucks here, ten there, everything explosively surging upwards? It’s being nickel and dimed to death by a thousand cuts. Even a self-absorbed bastard like me has done something peculiar. Cut back. I’m like hey Umair, maybe you don’t need fourteen cups of coffee you barely drink…when they’re like $87 dollars a day. Maybe, I don’t know, don’t just throw all that money away.
What is even going on here? How did stuff get this eye-wateringly expensive? And is it going to end?
This is the reality of an age of inflation. It’s weirdly nightmarish. You can’t do anything about it. You have two choices: cut back, or suck it up, and pay. And the price rises are totally, completely out of control. I used the example of my little coffee shop — but in truth, it’s everything. Grocery shopping? It’s insane! It’s like offering a crook an open invitation to pick your pocket. We’re not even feeding a family, and I don’t think we leave our daily shop spending less than $50. All we buy is enough for the day. Snowy’s treats now cost $20 a bag. I know my dog is basically the Dauphin, and has the taste of Louis Quatorze but come on dude. It’s aggressively painful watching your dog eat twenty dollar bills for breakfast, and then grin up at you like a little happy gremlin.
I could go on and on. The stuff for my music? Hahaha. Don’t make me laugh. Music gear has exploded in price — gone up by hundreds of percent. Good luck haggling over a car, though maybe that’s a relief. Clothes. Electronics. Energy. The list is endless. The days of falling prices seem to be over. Everything is on its way up faster than if you pee on Donald Trump, he gets a — never mind.
I’m sure you’ve felt the pain — and the sense of crazy, too. A $15 dollar sandwich? Are you kidding me? What’s it served in, the holy grail?
It’s often said by pundits that all this is the fault of one man, and I don’t just mean maniac baboon Jeff Bezos on a scooter with a giant black marker, but everyone else’s other least favourite person. Vladimir Putin. There’s some truth in that, but not enough. Yes, Putin’s war has had a ruinous effect on energy prices globally, and it’s about to hit commodity and food prices, too. But the truth is that this age of inflation started well before Putin’s war — and it’s about more than that, too.
It’s been a few years, and if you’ve been paying attention to things like commodities prices — and why would you if you’re a normal person, because, well, you’ve got a life to live — they’ve generally been rising. They’ve been rising because harvests have been failing. Everything from coffee to sugar harvests to wheat crops have been failing over the last few years.
And that is because we live on a dying planet. This is an effect of climate change. Everybody in power is pretending to ignore this, by the way, in the way that these things go. Imagine a conversation between two investment bankers, or a Prime Minister and his Economic Advisors. “Hey, Steve, do you know why the harvests of everything are beginning to fail? Hmm, it almost seems like there’s a pattern here!” “Why, sir. It’s just a coincidence! A run of bad luck, if you will! Statistics prove that if you spin a roulette wheel a million times, well, you’ll lose ten times in a row sometimes!! It’s pure chance!!” “What a relief! You mean it has nothing to do with, say, us turning the planet into an inhabitable garbage fire made of microplastics and radioactive billionaire dust?” “Nothing to do with that at all!!”
This is how idiotic our leaders actually are. It doesn’t take a genius to understand the following relationship. As the temperature rises, harvests will begin to fail. That is because formerly temperate zones begin to turn tropical or even desertify. Their water tables fail, the soil turns arid, and the ecosystems supporting crops and grains and so forth begin to wither. That is exactly what is happening to us on the highest economic level. We’re at about 1 degree and something of climate change — that’s all — but we’re already a planet where harvests are beginning to fail.
And as harvests fail, obviously, prices began to explode. For food. For everything that depends on food, like labour. For all the byproducts of our food systems, like biodiesel and so forth. For commodities in general, because mining too, gets a lot harder as temperatures rise. The famous “chip shortage,” too, was largely an effect of climate change. It’s due to a fire at one factory, a drought in another, and a storm at another — and it’s caused the world’s electronics to suffer a long term undersupply.
So let me say it plainly, since our leaders are terrified of telling you this, and maybe rightly so, because your next question is going to be, after gnashing your teeth in horror, so this isn’t going to end? This phase of inflation is about a dying planet.
Before I answer the question, “Will this end?” let me come back to energy for a moment. Food prices rising — commodities prices in general — were a direct effect of climate change. So what about Putin’s war? Well, just think about what it’s really about. Controlling resources. Putin knows that if he controls the resources — oil, gas, metal, wheat, and so forth — he can control a dying planet. He who controls the resources controls a dying planet, because we all need them that much more. You can see this very, very clearly in the way that Putin’s skewered Europe right on the horns on an insoluble dilemma: allow war in Ukraine, or depend on Russian resources?
Putin’s war in Ukraine is driven by ideological reasons, true — the weird blend of religion and fanaticism I’ve called New Age Fascism. But more than that, it’s the first of the great resource wars on a dying planet. Ukraine is a strategically vital nation, at least on a dying planet — it’s Europe’s breadbasket, provides the world all kinds of basic resources from wheat to metals. Ukraine is one of the very first nations you’d want to conquer if you wanted to control what few resources were going to be left on a dying planet, and this is the deeper logic of Putin’s game.
Resource wars are not going to end. In fact, they are only now just getting started — just after commodities prices have been soaring for the last few years thanks to failed harvests. See how predictable that is? It’s not that the two are even consciously linked — some dictator sees commodities prices rising and thinks “it’s time for war!” — it’s just that this is what inevitably happens. Putin’s wars are obviously not going to end. China, soon enough, will have to secure its own empire of resources, as the planet goes on dying. The West appears to have no strategy for any of this, because it’s only answer is “globalization,” which has failed the way that my first marriage did — she threw plates at me, dear reader, because I was a bastard.
We are therefore now entering an age of a) resource wars b) shortages and c) inflation. Serious, sustained, vicious inflation. These three things have already the defined the 2020s. What did Covid do? Cause shortages around the globe — in a foreshadowing of the future on a dying planet. Covid highlighted just how illusionary all this abundance of stuff really is — ships stop for a few days, borders shut down for a day or two, and bang — you can’t get stuff to eat or drink the way you’re used to. But what happens on a planet of mega fires and mega floods and mega weather? Mega risk does. Shortages becomes endemic, a way of life. As they slowly are now.
The flipside of shortages is, of course, inflation. And inflation is the savage, gruesome reality of living on a dying planet. There isn’t enough left to go around. There never was. 20% of humanity — otherwise known as “The West” — consumes 90% of the planet’s resources. That leaves just 10% of them for 80% of humanity. The rest of the world has always lived without. It’s just we in the West who are starting to discover what the real economics of existence are.
The truth is that we’ve underpaid for the global resources we monopolize. We’ve “externalized” the costs of climate change, of failing harvests, of ecological collapse, of basically slave labour, and now, by propping up murderous dictators, it turns out, of war, too. The stuff we came to happily take for granted, piled high on the shelves, was artificially cheap. That meant our lifestyles were artificially grandiose — our living standards artificially raised.
That was dumb, guys. It was dumb building a global economy like this. Where someone — you and me — go to the store, pick up, I don’t know, a bag of sugar, and don’t see the slave labour, hydrocarbons, war it’s really made of. Maybe the average person will never see that — but we built a global economy where they were allowed to be ignorant and blind. Our leaders should have priced all those externalities in — through fair trade deals and so forth — because now, we’re going to pay for them the hard way.
It’s going to be a long, bitter, painful era of inflation. We’re going to be very, very lucky if it just lasts a decade. Central banks raising rates are only going to make it worse — because guess what, you can’t resurrect a dead harvest with an interest rate. I know financial types think Money is God, but, no, only Jesus can do that.
What we have here is a series of supply shocks — the greatest in history, probably. Everything is starting to run out. Guess how many coffee and sugar harvests there are going to be when the temperature rises by four degrees? None. Guess how many new mines there are going to be? Now guess how many wars there are going to be. How high prices will continue to go.
In the face of this series of catastrophic supply shocks, our old ways don’t work. Central banks are going to raise rates, and that’s only going to make the problem worse. Because now you’re paying more in interest — but that’s not helping resurrect a dying planet. It’s just making you poorer, and making the rich richer. Go, capitalism, go! Kill me, please! The only way out of this is to reconstitute the entire material basis of our global economy. That means no more hydrocarbons. It means far, far less capital intensity. It means a way to supply people with everything from cars to fuel to energy to sugar to coffee that doesn’t a) kill the planet b) prop up psychotic billiionaires and dictators and c) end up causing war.
We have no idea — none — how to do any of that. If we were smart, we’d launch a Manhattan Project for it all — a series of them, in fact. To reinvent the material basis of our economy. Understanding that right about now, three degree or so of warming are — pardon the pun, go ahead and laugh like I just drove you into a psychotic state…baked in — so…well…how are we going to live? Where’s the harvest going to come from? How do we power civilization without hydrocarbons? What do we eat? How do we even drink water, without being forced to kill each other for it?
We need to reimagine our entire civilization, our entire global economy, the social contracts and socioeconomic compacts which distribute resources to people, detoxify those resource of everything from carbon to slave labour to war.
Not because I’m the reincarnation of John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix in the form of a brown dude. I’m not, though it’d be nice. Because we have to, or else…
Or else what?
Do you like the 2020s so far? What are you, an idiot? There are only three kinds of people who like the 2020s so far. One, Jeff Bezos on a scooter. Two, Baby Hitler or Vladimir Putin, but I repeat myself. And three, Satan, because let’s face it, this he’s rubbing his hands with glee and shouting “See! I told you! They are idiots!” to his minions, who are massaging his feet with baby’s tears.
Do you like the 2020s so far? I didn’t think so. That’s what the future looks like, into forever…unless we change it.
