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Perhaps not entire civilization collapse, pending nuclear arsenals unleashed, but I think we are edging ever closer to massive social upheaval, what shape of th

Perhaps not entire civilization collapse, pending nuclear arsenals unleashed, but I think we are edging ever closer to massive social upheaval, what shape of this I am unsure about. To quote an adjacent article that was mentioned in this one: How Western Civilization Could Collapse > Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the elites due to the absence of labour. The inequalities we see today both within and between countries already point to such disparities. For example, the top 10% of global income earners are responsible for almost as much total greenhouse gas emissions as the bottom 90% combined. Similarly, about half the world’s population lives on less than $3 per day[0][1] This is from 2017. This has gotten, in my view, much worse and is not continuing to alleviate itself, and I believe climate change is only making this worse over the next 5-10 years as wealthier nations and their wealthiest citizens try to insulate themselves further from its effects at the expense or perceived expense of the poor. I don’t think the current political climate is going to prove its sustainable. Couple that with serious economic pressures as in part, a result of globalization and coming shortages and issues of natural resources and it’s a recipe for real disaster [0]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170418-how-western-civilisation-could-collapse https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170418-how-western-civi... [1]: https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/3/4/470/2669331/Modeling-sustainability-population-inequality https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/3/4/470/2669331/Modelin...

branko_d 5y ago
The best stats you've ever seen | Hans Rosling https://youtu.be/hVimVzgtD6w https://youtu.be/hVimVzgtD6w
- noahtallen 5y ago
  I do really like that video and the book Factfulness. However, income inequality is definitely one of the things getting worse with time. And it’s scary for everyone, because if you don’t have money, your ability to survive is reduced, and if you do have money… look back to what happened only a handful of centuries ago or even less when the proletariat revolted. Sure, we aren’t there currently, but the trajectory is not going in a direction which inspires confidence in our future.
  - korantu 5y ago
    Is income inequality even good measure in the forst place? More and more people of this world are rising out of poverty, and getting education, why specifically does uphieval would occur?
    - kortilla 5y ago
      No, it’s not a good measure, but it is a useful tool for people to build support for political upheaval that wouldn’t otherwise be justified.
      - diordiderot 5y ago
        The thing is, it's all relevant. You can't pretend human psychology doesn't exist
    - raducu 5y ago
      Measure of what? Income is a proxy for a lot of tings. While completely understandable and rational, people racing to get out of poverty at the same time as the great climate change catastrophe, feminism (sexes "wars"), all sorts of minority/ perpetual victims/ alternative motivation groups/attention wars -- I don't see how we'll navigate these centrifugal forces and chaos in a wise and beneficial way for the planet and for us on the long term.
  - rogue7 5y ago
    At first I really liked Hans Rosling's book. But afterwards I read some very valid criticism [0]. > We see that while per capita income has indeed increased in the global South, the global North has captured the vast majority of new income generated by global growth since 1960. As a result, the income gap between the average person in the North and the average person in the South has nearly quadrupled in size, going from $9,000 in 1960 to $35,000 today. > In other words, there has been no “catch up”, no “convergence”. On the contrary, what’s happening is divergence, big time. The same goes for the other topics, including biodiversity. [0] https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/3/17/two-hump-world https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/3/17/two-hump-world
- mistermann 5y ago
  Having not watched the video due to crappy mobile (but I've seen some of his videos before), is this a "things are getting better, stay the course" type video, a "many things are ok, but we have very serious problems here", something else?
  - rogue7 5y ago
    > is this a "things are getting better, stay the course" type video Yes. And sadly it isn't happening from what I can tell ; see for instance the latest IPCC report [0]. [0] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
  - vishnugupta 5y ago
    > "things are getting better, stay the course" This is the overarching theme.
99_00 5y ago
>Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough What does it mean for the "working population" to "crash"? In the West and the rest of the world, those with the lowest income have the highest birth rate. So it can't mean a decrease in population due to low birth rate.
- no_wizard 5y ago
  In context this means political and economic crash, where the poor / working class lose their shirts in an economic upheaval (of which we’ve had at least two in my lifetime, the 2008 crash and the previous dotcom bubble). Unemployment at high levels etc. think 1930s depression
  - noahtallen 5y ago
    If we look back further, the situation can be even more dire (like the French or Russian revolutions).
- fractalb 5y ago
  But they don't have better health, education, and life expectancy. So they can't make the rich any richer. And at the same time, they will continue to become poorer.
  - 99_00 5y ago
    Why do they need better anything to avoid civilizations collapse? Why do the rich need to get richer to avoid civilizations collapse? If the status quo was maintained civilization would not be in danger.
eplanit 5y ago
As a US citizen, I've been wondering for almost 10 years now if we're edging towards a new civil war. In the past 5 or so, I've been worrying almost equally about the state of global affairs setting the stage for potential world war. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have been in a relatively stable world (9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan notwithstanding -- none of them world war scale), but it now feels ever less so all the time. If one has to have either a civil war or a world war (bizarre choice), a world war would actually serve to unite us, although our existing division is a weak starting place. A civil war destroys us from within, full stop. My favorite conspiracy theory is that the CCP is sowing the division within us to drive us to civil war, whereby they win WWIII without ever firing a shot.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Replace CCP with Russia, and it's not a conspiracy theory.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    Correct. https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Pillars-of-Russia%E2%80%99s-Disinformation-and-Propaganda-Ecosystem_08-04-20.pdf https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Pillars-of-...
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  We are already in a low-level Civil War and have been for quite some time. The important thing to understand is that digital / media / information warfare will be the future of warfare, both in the US and abroad. Why? For better or worse, the average person in America is lazy. Arguing online is easy, but actually engaging in kinetic warfare over a sustained period of time is extremely difficult. Even the minor conflicts that erupt at protests are tiny and irrelevant compared to an actual civil war. There's also not much money to be made in actually destroying things, as compared to drumming up outrage (which is how the media, large and small, Alex Jones to CNN, makes its money.) My favorite conspiracy theory is that the CCP is sowing the division within us to drive us to civil war, whereby they win WWIII without ever firing a shot. This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's basic geopolitics. Every large state does this to each other. The US to China, China to the US, US to Russia, Russia to US.
wyager 5y ago
The quote you inlined strikes me as total nonsense. First, there is no local mechanism by which having too small of a fraction of the total wealth that exists everywhere will cause a group to “crash”. Groups “crash” (assuming a sane interpretation of that word) usually due to local effects, like not having enough money to buy food, and not because they’re poor compared to someone else somewhere else. Obviously relative poverty could inspire a political movement or something, but I’m not seeing the “crash” here. Second, power law distributions for wealth are natural, seem to have existed for all of civilizational history, and are arguably the only kind of stable equilibrium state that is possible with current technology. Third, the appeal to greenhouse gas emissions seems less like part of a coherent economic argument and more of an irrelevant appeal to the idea that wealthy people (90% of Americans, in this case) are bad because they do wealthy people stuff like enjoy abundant food and energy.
- esarbe 5y ago
  No, the crash will come from a total systemic collapse, caused by the ecosystem destruction we are wrecking. Climate change by greenhouse gas emission is just the cherry on top. The knife to the eye, so to speak. Since the middle of the 20th century, we've lost about 75% of biomass and roundabout the same in biodiversity. Our biological support systems are collapsing all around us. System shaped by natural selection are extremely resilient. That has prevented much of the damage to manifest itself in clear signals. But now the damage has become so big that even nature's resilience cannot cope with it anymore and we start to witness more and more systems fragment and fail. See the Great Barrier reef. This is just the start. Water is beginning to get critically scarce in many regions of the world. The political upheavals caused by the effects of predatory over exploitation and pollution will bring down nations. And so forth.
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    If the ecosystem and climate collapsed, us rich folk could live in air conditioned houses powered by solar or nuclear power, eat food grown in green houses and drink desalinated water. It would be a truly miserable experience, but it doesn't necessarily mean the end of civilization. The wars started by those who no longer can afford food might end civilization, but that's not assured either.
kortilla 5y ago
> crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, This is an absolutely moronic premise to start with. The portion doesn’t matter as long as the purchasing power stays static or is increasing. The population doesn’t collapse when people are still getting abundant food, shelter, etc regardless of how well the rich are doing. The focus on the income of the rich instead of poverty is a distraction to pull people into a power struggle they otherwise wouldn’t care about. It’s better to have obscenely wealthy + a high earning middle class than poverty across the board. However, the reframing of everything into income inequality makes the latter sound somehow better.
- runarberg 5y ago
  But an ever growing population isn’t getting shelter (or very poor shelter), and as the climate crisis gets worse (and the wars of the world worsen) I would expect that on the global scale an ever growing population would also go hungry. These people will start migrating to the places that don’t have famines and wars. And if the current border policies persist, these people won’t be welcomed by the government. This means that you will have people rebelling against a government which is denying them food and shelter.
  - esarbe 5y ago
    Absolutely. People always forget how population migrations can bring down empires. What do you expect these climate refugees to do? Die quietly? "Well, we earned it, not being born into wealthy societies. We've got no one else to blame but us"? Get real. There will be strive and conflict and war, and everyone (lookin' at you, China, USA and Russia) will still be playing the 'Great Game' and try to one-up the other ones, even though survival is at stake.
rogue7 5y ago
There are also these data points [0], that show that the newer generations have fewer and fewer wealth. [0] https://twitter.com/CharlotteAlter/status/1431279504807366660?s=20 https://twitter.com/CharlotteAlter/status/143127950480736666...
- Jyaif 5y ago
  That graph is misleading (to say the least) because it is not per capita. The reason the baby boomer had a much larger share of the national wealth is because they were a much larger share of the population. If you do the same graph per capita, you'll see that there's pretty much no difference between generations.
Isinlor 5y ago
The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago, and almost unimaginably better than it was 200 years ago. The worst 10% today do about as well as majority of West was doing back then. And the condition of the poor is improving rapidly. The places were it is not true, it is due to wars. But well, this is perspective of a Polish person. My country lost 25% of the population during wars with Sweden, 90% population of Warsaw. And then another 20% in WWII, and another 90% of Warsaw was lost. My grandmother lived through that. Later, during communist regime she managed to escape Poland right before Martial Law in 80' to Netherlands. My mother was persecuted after that due to contacts in the West. Now we live in the EU. I have extremely hard time imagining my Swedish or German colleagues trying to kill me. Not everyone is peaceful to the east, but at least their tanks are not in Poland. That's progress too.
- diordiderot 5y ago
  Your husband takes out a variable rate mortgage 120% of your homes value to spend on luxury goods, Buys a g-wagon, and starts embezzling from his company. Instead of paying for utilities you steal then from neighbors. To save on garbage collection you fly tip. The last 5 years have been wonderful for you quality of life. You shouldn't question your situation because things are 'better'.
  - qsort 5y ago
    What does this have to do with anything? Most of the West (let alone most of the rest of the world) is far better off than it was even just 50 years ago by almost every single metric you can conceive. It's hard to believe it's due to financial games exclusively: people are better off in real terms. Inequality is a problem because when members of your community are living in very different conditions, the cohesion of said community is undermined, but worrying about inequality is the archetypical first world problem: a problem nonetheless, but a problem that presumes you've come a long way.
    - rmchugh 5y ago
      it's not about financial games, but rather externalities. There are significant external costs of our way of life that are borne by others. That new car emits CO2 that contributes to global heating. The steaks we eat come from cows that have been fed with soy beans from cleared rainforests. etc etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative
OneTimePetes 5y ago
We are better prepared for it then ever though. We have social implants, which at least in part allow mob-violence prevention (filming and upload). We have scenario tree root hardening. Youtube allows technology recovery, we have lots of old, sturdy tech and did not invest in to many technologies that are "high tech" but brittle. Which means, even after a downfall, our odds of recovery are much better. We have electronic media, which allows to entertain and stun large masses of people without consuming much. j Its not the vision of humanity we had, but a starving monk sitting in the desert, dreaming of the future, while hypnotized by the coloured light from a electric rock, is the best we got.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
I'm generally of the opinion that the solutions to climate change also help global inequality. As a simple example, the equator now has access to the cheapest energy in human history, and in a very democratic way that can't be controlled by a small elite. But it seems common to claim that dealing with it will make this worse. Is there any actual reasons behind this or is it just "renewable energy will kill birds" again, a sociopathic attempt to use peoples empathy against them?
esarbe 5y ago
Let me paint the shape of the calamity to come: Our predatory exploitation of our biological life-support system and the massive reconfiguration of the climatic setup will cause enough disruption so as to lead to a breakdown in global cooperation. The damage wrought by pollution and over-consumption of natural resources will finally lead to a breakdown local ecosystems and to famine. Huge waves of refugees will (rightfully) demand a place to live sheltered from the calamities of climate change and they will be denied. Global commerce will stall and then stop, as refugees from failing states and countries turn to banditry and piracy. This will disrupt global cooperation and lead to regional conflicts that turn will lead to war over resources. At least that's my best guess. The sad thing is that we probably all see it coming, but we are in denial of it's reality. At least as a civilization. We're still chasing profit margin where where should gear for a fight for survival. Classic Greek tragedy!

branko_d 5y ago

The best stats you've ever seen | Hans Rosling https://youtu.be/hVimVzgtD6w https://youtu.be/hVimVzgtD6w

noahtallen 5y ago
I do really like that video and the book Factfulness. However, income inequality is definitely one of the things getting worse with time. And it’s scary for everyone, because if you don’t have money, your ability to survive is reduced, and if you do have money… look back to what happened only a handful of centuries ago or even less when the proletariat revolted. Sure, we aren’t there currently, but the trajectory is not going in a direction which inspires confidence in our future.
- korantu 5y ago
  Is income inequality even good measure in the forst place? More and more people of this world are rising out of poverty, and getting education, why specifically does uphieval would occur?
  - kortilla 5y ago
    No, it’s not a good measure, but it is a useful tool for people to build support for political upheaval that wouldn’t otherwise be justified.
    - diordiderot 5y ago
      The thing is, it's all relevant. You can't pretend human psychology doesn't exist
  - raducu 5y ago
    Measure of what? Income is a proxy for a lot of tings. While completely understandable and rational, people racing to get out of poverty at the same time as the great climate change catastrophe, feminism (sexes "wars"), all sorts of minority/ perpetual victims/ alternative motivation groups/attention wars -- I don't see how we'll navigate these centrifugal forces and chaos in a wise and beneficial way for the planet and for us on the long term.
- rogue7 5y ago
  At first I really liked Hans Rosling's book. But afterwards I read some very valid criticism [0]. > We see that while per capita income has indeed increased in the global South, the global North has captured the vast majority of new income generated by global growth since 1960. As a result, the income gap between the average person in the North and the average person in the South has nearly quadrupled in size, going from $9,000 in 1960 to $35,000 today. > In other words, there has been no “catch up”, no “convergence”. On the contrary, what’s happening is divergence, big time. The same goes for the other topics, including biodiversity. [0] https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/3/17/two-hump-world https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/3/17/two-hump-world
mistermann 5y ago
Having not watched the video due to crappy mobile (but I've seen some of his videos before), is this a "things are getting better, stay the course" type video, a "many things are ok, but we have very serious problems here", something else?
- rogue7 5y ago
  > is this a "things are getting better, stay the course" type video Yes. And sadly it isn't happening from what I can tell ; see for instance the latest IPCC report [0]. [0] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
- vishnugupta 5y ago
  > "things are getting better, stay the course" This is the overarching theme.

99_00 5y ago

>Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough What does it mean for the "working population" to "crash"? In the West and the rest of the world, those with the lowest income have the highest birth rate. So it can't mean a decrease in population due to low birth rate.

no_wizard 5y ago
In context this means political and economic crash, where the poor / working class lose their shirts in an economic upheaval (of which we’ve had at least two in my lifetime, the 2008 crash and the previous dotcom bubble). Unemployment at high levels etc. think 1930s depression
- noahtallen 5y ago
  If we look back further, the situation can be even more dire (like the French or Russian revolutions).
fractalb 5y ago
But they don't have better health, education, and life expectancy. So they can't make the rich any richer. And at the same time, they will continue to become poorer.
- 99_00 5y ago
  Why do they need better anything to avoid civilizations collapse? Why do the rich need to get richer to avoid civilizations collapse? If the status quo was maintained civilization would not be in danger.

eplanit 5y ago

As a US citizen, I've been wondering for almost 10 years now if we're edging towards a new civil war. In the past 5 or so, I've been worrying almost equally about the state of global affairs setting the stage for potential world war. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have been in a relatively stable world (9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan notwithstanding -- none of them world war scale), but it now feels ever less so all the time. If one has to have either a civil war or a world war (bizarre choice), a world war would actually serve to unite us, although our existing division is a weak starting place. A civil war destroys us from within, full stop. My favorite conspiracy theory is that the CCP is sowing the division within us to drive us to civil war, whereby they win WWIII without ever firing a shot.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Replace CCP with Russia, and it's not a conspiracy theory.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  Correct. https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Pillars-of-Russia%E2%80%99s-Disinformation-and-Propaganda-Ecosystem_08-04-20.pdf https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Pillars-of-...
ceilingcorner 5y ago
We are already in a low-level Civil War and have been for quite some time. The important thing to understand is that digital / media / information warfare will be the future of warfare, both in the US and abroad. Why? For better or worse, the average person in America is lazy. Arguing online is easy, but actually engaging in kinetic warfare over a sustained period of time is extremely difficult. Even the minor conflicts that erupt at protests are tiny and irrelevant compared to an actual civil war. There's also not much money to be made in actually destroying things, as compared to drumming up outrage (which is how the media, large and small, Alex Jones to CNN, makes its money.) My favorite conspiracy theory is that the CCP is sowing the division within us to drive us to civil war, whereby they win WWIII without ever firing a shot. This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's basic geopolitics. Every large state does this to each other. The US to China, China to the US, US to Russia, Russia to US.

wyager 5y ago

The quote you inlined strikes me as total nonsense. First, there is no local mechanism by which having too small of a fraction of the total wealth that exists everywhere will cause a group to “crash”. Groups “crash” (assuming a sane interpretation of that word) usually due to local effects, like not having enough money to buy food, and not because they’re poor compared to someone else somewhere else. Obviously relative poverty could inspire a political movement or something, but I’m not seeing the “crash” here. Second, power law distributions for wealth are natural, seem to have existed for all of civilizational history, and are arguably the only kind of stable equilibrium state that is possible with current technology. Third, the appeal to greenhouse gas emissions seems less like part of a coherent economic argument and more of an irrelevant appeal to the idea that wealthy people (90% of Americans, in this case) are bad because they do wealthy people stuff like enjoy abundant food and energy.

esarbe 5y ago
No, the crash will come from a total systemic collapse, caused by the ecosystem destruction we are wrecking. Climate change by greenhouse gas emission is just the cherry on top. The knife to the eye, so to speak. Since the middle of the 20th century, we've lost about 75% of biomass and roundabout the same in biodiversity. Our biological support systems are collapsing all around us. System shaped by natural selection are extremely resilient. That has prevented much of the damage to manifest itself in clear signals. But now the damage has become so big that even nature's resilience cannot cope with it anymore and we start to witness more and more systems fragment and fail. See the Great Barrier reef. This is just the start. Water is beginning to get critically scarce in many regions of the world. The political upheavals caused by the effects of predatory over exploitation and pollution will bring down nations. And so forth.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  If the ecosystem and climate collapsed, us rich folk could live in air conditioned houses powered by solar or nuclear power, eat food grown in green houses and drink desalinated water. It would be a truly miserable experience, but it doesn't necessarily mean the end of civilization. The wars started by those who no longer can afford food might end civilization, but that's not assured either.

kortilla 5y ago

> crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, This is an absolutely moronic premise to start with. The portion doesn’t matter as long as the purchasing power stays static or is increasing. The population doesn’t collapse when people are still getting abundant food, shelter, etc regardless of how well the rich are doing. The focus on the income of the rich instead of poverty is a distraction to pull people into a power struggle they otherwise wouldn’t care about. It’s better to have obscenely wealthy + a high earning middle class than poverty across the board. However, the reframing of everything into income inequality makes the latter sound somehow better.

runarberg 5y ago
But an ever growing population isn’t getting shelter (or very poor shelter), and as the climate crisis gets worse (and the wars of the world worsen) I would expect that on the global scale an ever growing population would also go hungry. These people will start migrating to the places that don’t have famines and wars. And if the current border policies persist, these people won’t be welcomed by the government. This means that you will have people rebelling against a government which is denying them food and shelter.
- esarbe 5y ago
  Absolutely. People always forget how population migrations can bring down empires. What do you expect these climate refugees to do? Die quietly? "Well, we earned it, not being born into wealthy societies. We've got no one else to blame but us"? Get real. There will be strive and conflict and war, and everyone (lookin' at you, China, USA and Russia) will still be playing the 'Great Game' and try to one-up the other ones, even though survival is at stake.

rogue7 5y ago

There are also these data points [0], that show that the newer generations have fewer and fewer wealth. [0] https://twitter.com/CharlotteAlter/status/1431279504807366660?s=20 https://twitter.com/CharlotteAlter/status/143127950480736666...

Jyaif 5y ago
That graph is misleading (to say the least) because it is not per capita. The reason the baby boomer had a much larger share of the national wealth is because they were a much larger share of the population. If you do the same graph per capita, you'll see that there's pretty much no difference between generations.

Isinlor 5y ago

The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago, and almost unimaginably better than it was 200 years ago. The worst 10% today do about as well as majority of West was doing back then. And the condition of the poor is improving rapidly. The places were it is not true, it is due to wars. But well, this is perspective of a Polish person. My country lost 25% of the population during wars with Sweden, 90% population of Warsaw. And then another 20% in WWII, and another 90% of Warsaw was lost. My grandmother lived through that. Later, during communist regime she managed to escape Poland right before Martial Law in 80' to Netherlands. My mother was persecuted after that due to contacts in the West. Now we live in the EU. I have extremely hard time imagining my Swedish or German colleagues trying to kill me. Not everyone is peaceful to the east, but at least their tanks are not in Poland. That's progress too.

diordiderot 5y ago
Your husband takes out a variable rate mortgage 120% of your homes value to spend on luxury goods, Buys a g-wagon, and starts embezzling from his company. Instead of paying for utilities you steal then from neighbors. To save on garbage collection you fly tip. The last 5 years have been wonderful for you quality of life. You shouldn't question your situation because things are 'better'.
- qsort 5y ago
  What does this have to do with anything? Most of the West (let alone most of the rest of the world) is far better off than it was even just 50 years ago by almost every single metric you can conceive. It's hard to believe it's due to financial games exclusively: people are better off in real terms. Inequality is a problem because when members of your community are living in very different conditions, the cohesion of said community is undermined, but worrying about inequality is the archetypical first world problem: a problem nonetheless, but a problem that presumes you've come a long way.
  - rmchugh 5y ago
    it's not about financial games, but rather externalities. There are significant external costs of our way of life that are borne by others. That new car emits CO2 that contributes to global heating. The steaks we eat come from cows that have been fed with soy beans from cleared rainforests. etc etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative

OneTimePetes 5y ago

We are better prepared for it then ever though. We have social implants, which at least in part allow mob-violence prevention (filming and upload). We have scenario tree root hardening. Youtube allows technology recovery, we have lots of old, sturdy tech and did not invest in to many technologies that are "high tech" but brittle. Which means, even after a downfall, our odds of recovery are much better. We have electronic media, which allows to entertain and stun large masses of people without consuming much. j Its not the vision of humanity we had, but a starving monk sitting in the desert, dreaming of the future, while hypnotized by the coloured light from a electric rock, is the best we got.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

I'm generally of the opinion that the solutions to climate change also help global inequality. As a simple example, the equator now has access to the cheapest energy in human history, and in a very democratic way that can't be controlled by a small elite. But it seems common to claim that dealing with it will make this worse. Is there any actual reasons behind this or is it just "renewable energy will kill birds" again, a sociopathic attempt to use peoples empathy against them?

esarbe 5y ago

Let me paint the shape of the calamity to come: Our predatory exploitation of our biological life-support system and the massive reconfiguration of the climatic setup will cause enough disruption so as to lead to a breakdown in global cooperation. The damage wrought by pollution and over-consumption of natural resources will finally lead to a breakdown local ecosystems and to famine. Huge waves of refugees will (rightfully) demand a place to live sheltered from the calamities of climate change and they will be denied. Global commerce will stall and then stop, as refugees from failing states and countries turn to banditry and piracy. This will disrupt global cooperation and lead to regional conflicts that turn will lead to war over resources. At least that's my best guess. The sad thing is that we probably all see it coming, but we are in denial of it's reality. At least as a civilization. We're still chasing profit margin where where should gear for a fight for survival. Classic Greek tragedy!