Mayhem behind and ahead, all hopes waylaid by contradictions.
It is difficult to want to keep up with the acceleration of disorder and collapse in most critical systems of our biosphere, global economy and war politics. Medium writers should be credited with adding new meaning to the term “write-off”.
One such summary is provided by Alan Urban @CollapseSurvival
Various media reports narrow and distil the information flood of events into a toxic enough brew. To keep personal equanimity, we try to keep our heads down with daily business as usual and keep pace to satisfy the process demands of our overcrowded human system cages.
The current acceleration I feel is our systems collapse being poured into a funnel. As the tube narrows the flow gets much faster. All our Economic growth now crowds and narrows the tube. In terms of simple physics analogy, our collapse processes are gaining momentum. Our struggles only increase their rate. For each little connection between everything that breaks, its various hidden links feel deprivation stress. unlink and break more connections along the chain.
We are all living inside a large building that is demolishing itself. The energy supplies that once resisted the gravity collapse our huge building are being removed.
East Asia and West Asia financial systems are very close to outright war.
The USA (West Asian / European) financial systems are tied to the US dollar which for half a century has been a fiat currency printed in exchange for oil from the middle east — the petro dollar. China, Russia, India, the BRICS nations, are collaborating in financial self-preservation to abandon this for their own commodity backed currency systems. [4] We should keep in mind that most war/politics these days is still about money, and behind it the energy resources that back its value.
All the nations are now competitors for our global diminishing oil supply. The USA shows great willingness to collapse other economies in order to reduce competition for its own fuel supply, needed to power domestic use and to power its 750 plus foreign military bases and fuel its armies of troops, ships, planes, trucks thought necessary to globally enforce its rules for using USA dollars that bring back global resources.
Petrol — Gasoline costs are rising, as large amounts are up-synthesized from the lighter carbon molecules of gas fracking, instead of the declining higher energy longer carbon chains of oil.
The USA is now a declining financial and military power, and the rate of relative decline is faster than any possible harmful measures to restore influence over the emergent East Asia powers, short of global nuclear holocaust.
Global food shortages are just beginning to be felt, as sanctions, global warming droughts, war, inflation, fertilizer shortages, and declining soil quality impact global ability of farmers to feed us [8]. Food prices rise. Inflation is hitting the poorest, and governments refuse to increase salaries of the lowest paid workers that keep our basic systems working.
USA has just about cannibalized Europe
Manufacture businesses are leaving Europe because they cannot get cheap enough energy and materials. They are going to the USA, and elsewhere. The act of permanent destruction of the Russian Gas pipeline seems to have played an advantageous role for the USA.
Global collapse means US dollar collapse
All predictions of a US dollar collapse continues to be denied, but the blowback winds of change continue to blow harder [5]. Continued use of trade sanctions as a weapon continues to force victim nations to make themselves immune to such bluster, and feeds into global systems collapse.
Any shooting war will speed up collapse.
Australia has become a global village idiot Patsy member of AUKUS.
It seems that the USA has decided to charge Australia billions of dollars (AU) to take over a few of its nuclear subs that are near their retirement date, and also build facilities to handle the high level radio wastes involved in reactor disposal.
Neither the US nor the UK have been able to solve the high level radioactive waste problem themselves, Australia has been singled out as a vulnerable fool, to try and build such a facility. The price is paying for membership of the nuclear submarine club. The Virginia class subs have reactors that use highly enriched Uranium. The UK has quite a few nuclear subs awaiting radioactive decommissioning. No doubt the strategic value of these pieces of underwater death buckets has depreciated, and the costs of having them has risen greatly.
Successive Australian governments have shown themselves willing to do anything to keep the US protecting its borders. Australia has quickly followed to support many unjust and stupid wars instigated by the USA. Now the media and politicians choose for us some aggressive military postures towards China. We regularly pay billions of dollars for junk USA military hardware that can’t be used in realistic situations. Australian government leaders soak up the hype generated by such big announcements in the USA-government controlled mainstream media.
For the submarines, its jobs for the boys without expertise and experience in field of managing and using such hardware. Just the effort and cost of having them, should paralyze the entire Australian defense budget, capabilities and personal for decades to come.
The real cost is a radioactive waste dump in Australia
The long term political and financial costs of building unproven high level radioactive material storage facilities, far outweighs any military defence benefits of having a few nuclear powered submarines. This requires deep geological burial and centuries of long term vigilence. The costs and accidents to be passed on to future generations. Our politicians are nuclear idiots.
As the global economy, civilization and biosphere systems collapse, and with them sinks the Australia economy and its naval fleets, the ability to build and maintain any such high level waste storage facility without serious widespread radioactive accidents in the future should be seriously doubted.
Full of contradictions
While we argue about logging old-growth forests, and the need for future carbon capture and storage, these forests are being clear felled. Australia is identified as leading developed nation doing such dirty work.
Collapse work in progress
Little bits of radio broadcast come to mind that I heard while driving to my lifestyle activities as usual. Biodiversity decline is in free fall. Like human disasters, the various insults and wipeouts we do as a species, can take decades to centuries to unravel all the connections, in the biosphere networks. Biodiversity of species numbers continues to fall for a long time after every impact. Impacts cascade for a long time.
happen over decades and century. After all, a large tree species can take a few centuries to grow to maturity, and die, and provide hollows, refuges for birds, and support for the decomposer species of fungi and insects.
Clear felling a forest area, the near instantaneous destruction of a mature ecological systems created by succession from the distant past. All ecosystems are miracles of evolved co-dependency.
All of the connections and transactions that keep holding our systems together require continual supply of energy.
Why Australia is such a Patsy? It is a long standing historical and social feature of our society. It is an unquestioned feature of the Australia ruling elites, that their fortunes are immersed in their ties of language, colonialism, capitalism, and bullying of undeveloped nations shared with the USA. In Australia’s eyes, the USA can do no wrong, and cannot be publicly criticized by any action or word. This hamstrings any kind of Australian pretense of independence and self-sufficiency.
Growth and Seneca Collapse are system features
I view collapse here as the loss of energy and material flows between nodes in complex system, leading to loss of, or irreversible change in the nodes themselves. Our models of this resolve to dynamic graphs. A node is a quantity source. Flows are the connections of our systems, and they are all “downhill” according the physical laws of energy and material entropy. A stock provides an output-only flow. In such a system growth, predation and mergers are standard methods of competition. To stand still is to perish.
Biodiversity flourishes or it dies
Our biosphere living organisms evolved to stabilize and maximize their energy flows, and reached long-run, semi-stable states of energy satisfied equilibrium flows from incoming solar energy.
Here individual mortality, continual variant generation, and extinctions maintain long term species balance and maximum energy utilization. Our living world is vast and diverse still, even now, when its diversity and healthy is a shadow of its former glory.
Global Economy explodes and dies
Our global economy can manage no such sustainable thing, as its energy flows depend on non-replaceable buried stocks of critical minerals and fossil fuels.
Berserk Nations of delusions
Our civilization of Homo colossus described by Catton’s “Overshoot” book has turned into a berserker. It is in its final out of control destruction mode, eating up the links and nodes that use to keep everything together like the Pacman game. All nations have corrupt Pacman cores of businesses acting as Mafias that have grown too large and hungry.
“Every nation is dodgy” — Simon Michaux
Unsustainable growth is a poison
Our “Feed Me” shop of big business monster horrors demand ever more blood. Each nation is providing its impact to local and global environment systems, according to its population, wealth and technology growth. Trading — cooperation, competition and predation are all energy using activities that are justified as a means to growth. Capitalism is our manifestation of our unbridled animal instincts for competition, territory occupation and resources acquisition, measured by our sophistication of money accumulation.
Just following our biological instincts as K-Selected Species.
We are only different from the biological systems we belong to, in our technology and energy sources, and enhanced use of tools to serve our basic biological instincts. Our species biological and environment dependencies are all inherited.
We are conditioned by being mammals, with long childhood and lifespan. We are ultimately subject to the same environment, cooperation, competition and extinction limitations while our brief biosphere relationship evolves towards its self-limiting termination.
K-selected species are characterized by long gestation periods lasting several months, slow maturation (and thus extended parental care), and long life spans. In addition, they tend to inhabit relatively stable biological communities, such as late-successional or climax forests (see ecological succession). [2]
All the other wild K-selected species are going extinct, because there are no more “relatively stable biological communities” in which human species are not carrying out total war on. We have occupied everywhere, and everywhere is subject to our global warming. We have “cornered the global market” for resources to feed our offspring, at the expense of all the other species, both K- and r- selected. We think and act as if we are the only game/species thread that exists on our planet, a true zero sum game.
Growth precedes collapse.
This century is becoming the ultimate horror parable of exponential growth, yet most people with economic stakes keep expressing the wish for their nation to keep growing their economy.
The Lie of GDP uncoupling
There is no economic growth without fossil fuel energy consumption growth. Uncoupling of GDP from greenhouse gas emissions is a lie.
We also have no chance of building a sustainable economy based on Non-renewable Renewable Energy Harvesting Technologies — NRREHT. [1], in the time needed to mitigate catastrophic global warming.
Such NRREHT systems which may be built in the time remaining, will not be able to completely replace the energy quantity, versatility and availability of fossil fuels. They do ease, at best, a very difficult, hard transition to a much smaller, low population density, with limited technology, and fall back to a ecological balanced human existence. If our species does make it through the collapse bottleneck and millennia of global heating, such NRREHT may be in our ruins and garbage dumps as part of a forgotten past.
The waste from NRREHT will stick around, because recycling them is too expensive as economies collapse. We cannot build the quantities required now, or for replacements as they break down, because the mining systems for critical minerals are hitting their energy and resource limits.
(8) The Unsustainable Green Transition | Simon Michaux — YouTube
Pushing for economic growth should be socially sanctioned.
Business growth desires are a zombie horror meme that grows, reinfects and refuses to die. It is still brazenly proclaimed goal of every pacman national government as it continues to eat up the world. The meme is regenerated forever by elite investors in a competition to grow their money.
References
[1] NRREHT — Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXXIII | by Steve Bull (https://olduvai.ca) | Apr, 2023 | Medium
[2] K-selected species | biology | Britannica
[3] Salmon need forests, and forests need salmon runs. Both are threatend by global warming. Why Scottish salmon need forests to survive — DW — 12/08/2020
[4] The Collapse of the Petrodollar | The London Financial
[6] Tall and old or dense and young: Which kind of forest is better for the climate? (mongabay.com)
[7] Collapse Catch-Up 4/16/23. This week we have news about record… | by Alan Urban | Apr, 2023 | Medium
[8] Global rice shortage is set to be the biggest in 20 years (cnbc.com)