The Slow Future

Here’s what’s going to happen : The next summers are going to be hot, each hotter every year. The news will say we are breaking new records, that we are seeing highs not seen for at least a couple of millenia. We will read the farmers have a hard time, that there’s drought and the produce is getting shorter. Farmers will be compensated or go bankrupt, and the news will be that it becomes harder to farm everywhere. All these things make sense to a person without memory, without awareness of consequences or causality. The Nemo fish which is the modern consumer can be kept in its fishbowl for quite some time.

The future that is predicted is becoming reality and the future we can no predict, with even more accuracy is deadly. It means death to a lot of people, and eventually all people. We have argued that the ability to predict the future, or at least have expectations of it, is the fundamental skill needed for survival. It is the reason humanity is alive today. If nobody ever worried about what would happen next, then we’d been eaten by creatures that did a long long time ago. It is easy to understand that as long as our leaders and politicians don’t respond to the clear predictions made by those that compete to produce the best ones, we are doomed do die. And because we have leaders we all have to share the fate of the shortsighted ones.

In a sense we are blessed with countries, we don’t want to reduce the number of them. We need more language barriers. Why? Because we humans are not the system we operate in, we are imperfect and as our planet changes we need to change our behaviour. You can fix problems because it makes money, but at some point you have to wonder if your fixes are ever going to work or result in the true goal : Survival.

The economy wants you to think you have eternal youth and endless opportunity to repair any damage, either that or (when it comes to medical insurance, pharmaceuticals and other health services) that you are fragile and run risk and should be treated preventively etc. etc. For each temperament there is the optimal mix of fear and hubris to drive you to maximum purchase and bondage (as a worker).  The question should be : Does this make me live longer and more healthy? The answer is that nobody really cares, unless that would be a USP of a specific product.

We need to be confronted with our real future, in which our pension will become worthless, in which order will break down in parts of the world, in which we will have to use robots to save us, and this has to be done as a huge investment that bankers won’t accept. We thus have to get rid of the privilige of bankers. We have to face the fact that most of us are too stupid to survive, not in a forrest, but in the reality we find ourselves in : A dry and hot world that is burning and becoming less hospitable every year. You may say “This is an exhageration”, but go look in Australia.

We also must not be fooled by temporary lapses in the deterioration, a drop in temperature, a sudden rain to break the dry spell. The predicitons and models take variation into account, and we should understand that this is only an opportunity to do more in a more comfortable world. But if it is 37 dergrees for 6 weeks a lot of people die, cognitive abilities fail. We can’t forget that right afterwards and act as if nothing happened. We must remind ourselves and others of the future we can see unfold, and ACT upon its ultimate outcome because our lives depend on it.

Reject the media if the present a slow future, a window on now to trigger an emotion. That’s entertainment, you are being tickled. But are you a child? Do you need tickles or something you can use to protect your life, kids, grandchildren?

Sanity Check

Well you followed the link and are now reading this, good! How do you feel about the recent months? Have you experienced unusual high temperatures? I have, I live in Holland and for weeks it was 35 degrees, tropical up to 37 even. And I had to work in a thin roofed room on the sunny side of an office building. Many have suffered from the heat. The heart needs to pump around more blood in an attempt to keep the core temperature optimal when it is hot, and this means heart patients and elderly people have been challenged (and if the heatwave of 2003 in France is anything to go by, many died!).

If you have not been shocked by this summer you may be insane

Now we know what is causing this, but even if we didn’t know, or even if you deny it, how do you feel about this? Next year will likely be more brutal, and the year after even more. Regions of Europe and the Middle East are said to become uninhabitable, mainly because if it’s above 37 Celsius and humidity is high, you simply can’t survive for more than half an hour or less.

How do you think someone feels that has been interested in climate change for more than 10 years? This summer has been like finding bear tracks during a forrest walk.  A very bad sign of things to come. Nature is showing its hand and its deadly, massive forrest fires, failt harvests and people fainting in the heat. QED so to say, but then nobody seems to be listening.

We listen and watch to much, it turns our brain into a formless directionless mush not capable of doing anything strong or willfull

The opposite is true though, everybody is listening, but to the wrong message, to a fake drone of distracting newsitems with zero positive or negative impact. Trump this Trump that, just to keep you insulted and demotivated to act on your own impulses or ideas. You can watch a million shows about more or less fantasy people, play VR games, try the new BBQ etc. but don’t you dare to think straight and from the facts!!

The facts are :

  1. Dangerous climate change is here, this summer killed hundreds of thousands of people
  2. The oil, gas and coal companies are just companies, with employees, they do not have private armies and they are not above the law, and right now they are a clear and present danger to everyone.
  3. Politicians and media are sedating and confusing the public with all kinds of nonsense, because fundamentally the economoy is the most lucrative thing to serve, even if it doesn’t serve any human values (including surival) anymore..

Dutch pro oil politicians are actually debating if they will give a 2 billion Euro advantages to corporations (mainly Shell Oil) while this idea was proposed by none of the parties!! How dead can democracy be?

What do you do if you work a 9 to 5 job, can’t afford rent because banks drive up prices all the time, are stuck with student loans or kids who need to compete in the schoolyard. You are stuck, pinned down by the banks (because does a simple house -really- have to cost 500.000 Euro? Be honest!) and forced to drive economic activity while the prudent thing to do would be vastly different..

We should :

  1. Make sure we allocate resources towards generating fresh water and chemical/fuel free agriculture (which is more drought resistant). We should revisit low energy intensity technologies to achieve fresh water and grow food. Current farming methods maximize economic turnover, cashflow. We need to eat and drink and so do plants and animals.
  2. Get a grip on those who are incentivised to sell oil, coal and gas, on every scale because those forces are simply dangerous and corrupting. The resources that these companies sell should be brought under central control for rationing, but the order needed for this may not exist.
  3. Think about our children and what they will experience. How can we do large scale things with few means (because really we can’t burn a lot of oil fixing climate change), how do we get CO2 out of the atmosphere at the fastest possible rate. There should litterally go trillions into fixing this.
  4. Figure out how to make our society resilient against severe fossil fuel restriction? If young people start burning IC cars because they are sick of being poisoned while we could use electric vehicles, and they manage to paralyze the fuel supply (as happened in France a few years back), what can we do?

We can live luxuriously with a lot less luxury than we demand today. We should ban the promotion of consumer behaviour, so no adds for flying to the Maldives or being an idiot that eats meat and drives a huge SUV.

Strangely what we also need to do is fight crime. For that we need to be brave. Why? Because oil/coal and gas companies align with criminal activity, because the way to use this resource to get rich is so simple : You get it and you sell it, and nobody cares what happens, everyone is glued to their screens. Beware: There needs to be a serious effort to reduce crime and remove potential criminals, even if our government is full of treehuggers and animal lovers.

Also strangely the rich, as global warming intensifies, conclude there are simply to many people. There will be a surge in racism, eugenic thinking along the lines that “hey, some need to die, let it be the least valuable”. Of course ‘value’ is likely to be measured in terms of money, and so the poor are sacrificed no matter what talent they posess. The already are in Africa as the rain has stopped and will drop 50+% in the next years, no water no food no people..

I think the best thing to happen is if some people united secretly and moved to remote places to start running carbon capturing or negative emissions activities. Not for profit but for effect. These extraeconomic enclaves will have to be a secret and not invite any economic exploitation of its resouces (which may be wood or some othe carbon capturing material). We call this Extraeconomic activity, and extraeconomic enclaves. The focus should not be on maximizing joy while slaving for a mortgage, it should be maximizing biomass production while surviving with simple means.