Fear of the New Year

What’s coming is daunting. We must spread the truth, prepare and resist.

Attica, Greece, Temple of Poseidon at sunset. Empires come and empires go. Getty Images for Unsplash.

First, welcome new readers. The reaction to and growth my post, Finding Truth in Dystopia, truly blew my mind. I am thrilled to have you — and all of those who have been with me on this journey for some time. Your support keeps me going. My output may be diminished for a while as I help my mother from the recent death of my father, but I’m not going away. I hope you will bear with me.

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Friends, I’ve been writing on climate change and overshoot here for well over three years now. My greatest regret is that I didn’t start decades ago. I sensed much was wrong by my teens — that the way we treat the Earth, each other, and what we’re taught to value — are shallow and destructive, but waited for someone else to solve the problems. Clearly, that was foolish.

Civilizations and empires rise and fall, and democracies are historically rare and have never achieved their true potential. Even the philosophically and scientifically advanced Athenians practiced slavery, and the Roman Empire died under the corpulent weight of its far-flung empire. Hitler’s rise was precipitated by the impoverishment of Germany after WWI. Economic desperation has repeatedly given rise to strongmen throughout history. All three of these examples are disturbingly salient in America today, but there’s more, the collapse of the natural world and our fragile climate conditions, the only ones which Homo sapiens is evolved for.

Beauty, wonder and creation. James Webb Telescope image, “Cosmic Cliffs.”

Science has brought us both wonders and horrors from the breathtaking images of the James Webb Telescope, to the ghastly images of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but in the face of collapse science is the only chronicler and predictor of our future, as badly applied as it has been to destructive business enterprise. That destruction is present on the highest of mountain tops, the deepest crevices of oceans, and in your body tissues and mine. We have treated the planet as a dump, and the dump literally lives in us, to the delight of the pharmaceutical industry.

Horror, destruction and insanity. Hiroshima on the day of the bomb, August 6, 1945, Yoshito Matsushige took the only known photos on the day of the event.

And the dump isn’t just our bodies, it’s in our minds. A recent study found .05 percent of our brains are now made of plastic, and we commit crimes against each other daily, at scale in never ending genocides, and at the personal level with mass shootings and driving vehicles into crowds of strangers. As the horror of the New Orleans car attack unfolds and furthers ethnic division as a possible Islamic State terror attack, let’s not forget the August 12, 2017, Charlottesville, VA ramming of a car into a crowd by a white supremacist. No one owns a moral license on hate crimes.

My articles have touched on numerous aspects of our out of control dilemma, from recording an increasing parade of man-made multi-billion dollar climate disasters, most recently Hurricane Helene, but going back years to the horrors of Australia, Canada and California wildfires. Climate disasters are not political, they are made so. The burning and sinking planet is scientific fact, but the charlatans who deny it are either liars who wish to profit from these disasters, or victims of propaganda. If anyone you know cites Climate: The Movie, I destroyed it here, so be prepared — it all ties back to far-right, climate change denial think tanks and oil money.

Spitting oil? I used this powerful illustration by Jim Cooke to illustrate my article Noxious Disinformation. Climate: The Movie. We are smothered in disinformation every day.

Red herrings are constantly foisted on the public such as EVs which are ultimately mostly powered by fossil fuels, and lithium mining for their batteries which is filthy, and destroys indigenous cultures, yet again. Consider, just one ton of lithium requires 500,000 gallons of water to process, ruined forever with chemicals, in some of the most drought stricken regions of the planet, in competition for agricultural and drinking water.

I have also researched “green” infrastructure — offshore wind for instance, iron-air batteries to smooth wind and power delivery and Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI), the idea that injecting particulates into the stratosphere could cool our overheated Earth.

However, our future really comes down to our behavior, not technology because there’s a huge Catch-22 no one is talking about.

This article on lithium mining, Showdown at Thacker Pass, dives into the realities of this northern Nevada project and lithium mining in other parts of the world. Photo: Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

Catch-22? How about the end of oil?

I would love to tell you that the deceased Green New Deal was going to be enough. It doesn’t matter, because scumbags like coal man Joe Manchin made sure it wouldn’t come to pass. It doesn’t matter even more, though, because oil is running out. The Green New Deal never had a chance, pure fantasy. Even mainstream television is catching on to this annoying problem. Watch oil centric Landman on Paramount+ to see what I mean, hardly a “liberal,” tree hugging production.

Or better yet, consider this article from some financial bros who advise people on making money from harvesting the Earth. Goehring & Rozencwajg Associates LLC bill themselves as Global Natural Resources Investors. Here is what they had to say about the Permian Basin in 2023. It’s tapping out, baby.

Nobody knows the exact date oil will become too expensive to extract, but it’s coming. Read my post, The End of Oil. I’m betting between ten and thirty years, but before that come rolling power outages, increasing inflation across all sectors, and massive layoffs. This is only logical, because everything we know depends on oil, including dinner tonight.

How do you build out renewables without oil and heavy diesel powered equipment? Answer is, you don’t. Oops.

We’re headed for a much lower energy world. Prepare accordingly. Build your local and regional community. Look for diverse, practical skill sets, from agricultural knowledge to medicine, construction, strategic military knowledge and more. Pool your resources, buy land, create a commune. Start thinking about what to do with your money before it has no value, and remember when your financial adviser recommends you put it in gold, you can’t eat a gold brick. Preppers, please weigh in, feel free to post links, this is not my area.

Never in my life did I think I would write such words, but here we are, with monsters about to be installed on January 20, poised to crash the last hope of a rational reaction to what Homo sapiens has brought on itself.

Oh yeah, and Happy New Year! Two weeks to Trump 2.0.