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The South Asian Polycrisis
- testemailfordg2 4y agoCrisis in India & China could be the deciding factors for a polycrisis. People can easily sideline the weightage of this factor, by pointing to their low per capita GDP when compared to other western & developed countries. Covid has shown that if factories in China are closed while the world is open, theb there would be inflation across the world because of decrease in supply. The fuel to this fire of inflation would be food export bans from countries like India, which have more than a billion to feed first and additonaly war in countries like Ukraine and Russia, further impacting food production / logistics around it.
- lvturner 4y agoI was hoping to find this in the first paragraph or so, but ended up looking elsewhere -- hopefully this helps those who are as apparently unaware as I: "A global polycrisis occurs when crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity's prospects. These interacting crises produce harms greater than the sum of those the crises would produce in isolation, were their host systems not so deeply interconnected" https://cascadeinstitute.org/technical-paper/what-is-a-global-polycrisis/#:~:text=A%20global%20polycrisis%20occurs%20when,systems%20not%20so%20deeply%20interconnected https://cascadeinstitute.org/technical-paper/what-is-a-globa....
- refurb 4y agoThis seems like a definition that isn’t really needed?
- EdwardDiego 4y agoSeems like you'd be wrong.
- refurb 4y agoPlease explain? We'd had multiple, interdependent crises in the past, but apparently, until now, we were ok just calling them "multiple crises". What changed?
- ianai 4y agoThey’re pointing out nonlinear combinations of negatives from multiple crises. Economies of scale, to inappropriately borrow a term, in the wrong direction. The definition absolutely is needed.
- tuatoru 4y ago> Economies of scale Synergy is the word. The combined effect being greater than the sum of its parts.
- viscanti 4y ago"multiple crises" could be crises that are dependent or independent. "polycrises" tells the reader that the focus is on the subset of multiple crises that are dependent and likely have complex interaction effects.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoWhy do we need the word "automobile"? Can't we just say "horseless motorized carriage"? Why call it a "computer" instead of an "electric brain"?
- refurb 4y agoI expect polycrisis to go the way of "water closet".
- ElevenLathe 4y agoPersonally, I like William Gibson's coining of the "Jackpot."
- buscoquadnary 4y agoI appreciate the definition at first I thought this had to do with some sort of interaction between Southeast Asians and the Polynesians.
- jonny_eh 4y agoOr they were lacking in polymaths
- CountSessine 4y agoThanks for this. My first suspicion was that it had something to do with crypto.
- hunglee2 4y agothe petro-dollar system really screws energy importers - an interest rate hike from the Fed is an economic Godzilla, a random event which turns up to casually destroy the entire country
- cercatrova 4y agoLet's also not forget that the Indian subcontinent will be too hot to feasibly live in in the next 50 to 100 years. As someone who came from there, there is no way I'd go back to live in India given that fact alone, not to even mention any others.
- s5300 4y agoWhat do you think will happen to the bulk of the population in this time?
- cercatrova 4y agoThose who are rich enough (or those who seek asylum and are accepted) will leave, and those who are not able to leave will literally roast alive. We are already seeing this today [0], so in 50 to 100 years, the temperatures will be such that no human will be able to live there anymore. [0] https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/climate-change-made-devastating-early-heat-in-india-and-pakistan-30-times-more-likely/ https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/climate-change-made-...
- s5300 4y agoDo you think we’ll actually see 500mil+ die in India directly from heat & heat related issues in the next 100 years? I’m very much starting to think we may, but I’m at least hoping they may be able to save themselves from catastrophe via nuclear energy & engineering.
- cercatrova 4y agoI do think so. Nuclear energy is great but it doesn't take carbon already in the air, so technologies would need to be developed for that. I am a techno-optimist but we are on the precipice in terms of how much time we have left.
- jokowueu 4y ago
- 2-718-281-828 4y agoWhat would be a realistic prognosis for Thailand and its peninsula?
- winReInstall 4y agoSingapore approach, basically arcology with a local state alliance to protect a comon border?
- braindead_in 4y ago> And India’s steps to secure its food supplies by limiting first wheat and sugar and now rice exports have sent shock waves through the global food economy. I wonder if the farm reforms which was later revoked could have made it much easier for India to handle the food crisis. It was one of the most significant reforms enacted, but Modi was forced to back down. But looks like there'll be no choice left but to push it through if the situation worsens.
- unmole 4y ago> I wonder if the farm reforms which was later revoked could have made it much easier for India to handle the food crisis. How? If anything liberalised agriculture would have incentivised growing crops other than rice and wheat.
- omegalulw 4y agoCrop rotation is agriculture 101 at this point. A diversity in crops being grown could very well lead to higher yields overall, including that of rice and wheat, even if they are not grown as often.
- unmole 4y agoRice and wheat are seasonal. Crop rotation is already baked into the Rabi-Kharif cycle. The idea that reducing acerage will lead to higher yields is wishful thinking.
- concordDance 4y agoIt's annoying how the rhetorical "one third of Pakistan underwater" has been repeated as fact even though a quick glance at a topological map shows that to be impossible for values of "underwater" that mean "comes up to your ankles at least".
- refurb 4y agoNever let eyeballs you grab during a crisis go to waste (not see an ad).
- EdwardDiego 4y agoHow is that impossible according to topology? Maybe there's some context like "1/3rd of the bits where people live is underwater". Like, my country is roughly the same size as Germany. But the relevant context is "but 90% of our landmass is hills or mountains, so only 10% of our land is actually inhabited" So yeah, 1/3 of what...
- winReInstall 4y agoJared Diomands: Collapse comes to mind, were island nations that overpopulated were taken down by a crisis of dependency.
- thoweuroi324 4y ago[flagged]
- paganel 4y agoIndustry is shutting down all over Europe [1] but no-one yet talks about a "poly-crisis" around these parts, it's like we're sleepwalkers, all it's fine as longs as we don't actively talk about it. And who-ever protests the causes behind it is labeled as a left-winger or right-winger (or both at the same time), and called an ally of Putin. I had expected Tooze to also write about it, after all the book that made him famous, The Wages of Destruction [2] (which I heartily recommend, I've just finished reading it), touched heavily on the Nazis' quest for energy resources. This time around Europe decided to cut itself off from said energy resources out of its own volition, never read of anything like that happening before in the context of a war. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/business/europe-energy-crisis-factories.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/business/europe-energy-cr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction
- yodelshady 4y agoEurope's crisis is wholly self-induced; a deliberate decision to switch off in favour of coal (Germany), or defund (France), or delay replacement of (UK) nuclear power stations in a region with cold dark winters and not the almost embarrassing excess of oil of Canada/Texas/Russia/Venezuela. That's it. A power grid cannot be allowed to fail and no financially credible projects to store the required amount of energy (minimum, tens of TWh) exist, so renewables in such an environment have left us wholly dependent on gas. Nuclear fuel can be stockpiled, wind simply cannot, again at the required scale. If you think it can be within the next 30 years you're an idiot, a liar or a data scientist, it's that simple. And yes, I've been to engineering conferences in EU where almost the entire topic now is "how do we minimise the damage from unreliable power". It takes zero financial acumen to realise the capital cost of the plant is not decreasing, the output is, and the best case is a reduction in output proportional to the interruption in power. That is the best case, much more frequent is a far greater loss of product. Quite a few people, myself included, were visibly on the verge of crying, because the writing is on the fucking wall. Quite honestly, the Energiewenders do not seem to give a shit, nor do they seem to about Germany's reversion to coal, a move that permanently make's Europe's position on the world stage re climate change laughable. This is not a Russia-induced crisis - comedy shows were mocking the certainty of Putin using gas as a weapon fifteen years ago. This is entirely self-induced.
- rejor121 4y agoChina has been going through something similar. The river is drying up due to no rain. Electricity black outs has forced factories to shut down by government decree.
- sn41 4y agoWhile I share the general concern about climate change, talk of population collapse in South Asia is all too familiar to be taken seriously at face value. In fact: life in South Asia has slowly been improving since Independence. Before independence, famines involving millions of deaths were common [1]. The one called "Chalisa Akaal" was particularly devastating. [2] In the 75 years since independence from Britain, IIRC there has been only one major famine in either India, Bangladesh and Pakistan taken together, the 1970 famine in Bangladesh just prior to the 1971 war. Green revolution has been a great boon. Doom and gloom about an overpopulated South Asia is common. On the other hand, perhaps the reason why the region is so populated is that it has historically been very conducive for human habitation even using very low technology. Where I believe most predictions have got it wrong is the ability of humans to adapt. I hope with John McCarthy, that science and sense will be able to overcome such dire crises. [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalisa_famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalisa_famine [3] http://jmc.stanford.edu/commentary/progress/index.html http://jmc.stanford.edu/commentary/progress/index.html
- rayiner 4y agoLife in Bangladesh has completely transformed even since I lived there in the mid 1980s. My dad laments that it’s too crowded and kids in his village don’t know what it’s like to take a boat to school anymore during monsoon, but progress has happened rapidly. Energy is the critical thing. We don’t have space for wind mills and solar panels. I’d love to see Pan-Asian cooperation on nuclear. Regrettably, I think all that will have to happen through alignment with China. The west is captured by Malthusian thinking, and their solution is “less brown people,” not “more energy, more infrastructure, more production.”
- foobarian 4y ago> and their solution is “less brown people,” not “more energy, more infrastructure, more production.” Sadly (or ironically?) the solution might be "less people" through "more energy infrastructure and production." I.e. development for whatever reason seems to drive population growth down, to the point where most of the west is losing population.