Update from the Archdruid Greer

[kenneal - lagger]

Thanks for that reference RB. I've used that Steve Keen quote as a strap line for some time now but decided on a change when I was told the Joan Baez quote I am now using. The Baez quote pretty much sums up the last 45 years of my life.

[Lord Beria3]

Eric, west of the 110th meridian is not someplace I’d want to be in North America any time in the next 400 years. Inland from the coast, you’re looking at extreme desertification — think Saharan conditions — and those coastal areas which are inhabitable can expect mass migration from Japan and other east Asian countries by sea (the currents make this very easy. Your best bet in North America is east of the 95th meridian west, north of the 35th parallel, and at least 50 feet above sea level if you’re close to salt water.

Rodger, over the next few decades it’ll wobble up and down. Tariffs could give the US industry a new lease on life, for a while. A growing number of urbanites are doing without cars, especially young people, so it’s a shrinking market in the long run; even so, for the next few decades I expect modest contraction but no obvious shifts.

Ross, I remember both of those too, and I recall painfully well the way that the same self-defeating inability to think in cycles crippled and destroyed the peak oil movement. We’ve got a few years yet — say, three to five — before depletion in the shale fields, together with depletion of other oil sources more generally, puts us back in panic mode. That, too, will end with another short-term fix…but it’ll run out sooner than shale, just as shale ran out sooner than the post-1970s fixes.

Dante, the time span 50-300 years is a little problematic. If I’m right — and so far things seem to be tracking my predictions fairly well — we’re in the opening stages of a descent into a deindustrial dark age, and technologies that will still be here in 50 years certainly will have vanished in 300 years. For example, I expect that 50 years from now cars will still be being manufactured and driven, though there may be large sections of the US (or former US where the roads are bad enough you’d need a Jeep; 300 years from now cars will be a matter of old stories. In the same way, the various technologies that depend on microelectronics may still be here in 50 years, but 300 years from now the global supply chains and technological infrastructure that make them possible will be centuries in the past; there may be a few computers in the hands of unusually stable governments and other institutions, maintained the way people in the Dark Ages maintained Roman aqueducts, but the capacity to make more will not be recovered for many centuries longer.

Half By Sea, Japan and eastern Asia generally have huge populations, many times larger than they will be able to support as fossil fuels price themselves out of the market for agricultural fuels, and there are no cost-effective replacements. That means that crop yields will drop to premodern levels, leaving tens of millions of people facing the choice between migration and starvation. As Japan and Korea are both well equipped with large watercraft, migration is the obvious answer, and the currents flow straight to the west coast of North America — do you recall the debris from the big Tohoku tsunami that washed up on the shores of Washington and Oregon? Boats,ships, converted container vessels — those will do the same thing. As soon as the US and Canada lose effective control of their western littorals, the mass migrations begin, and to judge by past examples, you probably don’t want to be in the way.

NomadicBeer, it’s quite simple. The currently privileged classes are on their way down, and know it — thus the nastiness and the delirium. Certain other classes, most of them deplorable to one extent or another, are on their way up, and know it — thus the much calmer and friendlier attitude there. The children of the affluent don’t need to embrace a new paradigm; the new paradigm will be embraced by others, and those others will become the new affluent class, while downward mobility becomes a hard reality for those who barricade themselves in a failing model of society. The classes that prospered during America’s imperial zenith are not the classes that will prosper in post-imperial America: that’s the driving force behind the turmoil we’re seeing right now.

Nomadicbeer, New York will end up with roughly the climate the east coast of Mexico has now. That can be rough to get through in the summers but, you know, people lived there long before air conditioning was invented. As for the center of the country, I’m basing my estimate on what happened during the interglacial before this one, when temperatures spiked to roughly the level we can expect them to get to this time around. The Sea Peoples are in fact the example I had in mind for mass maritime migration — and remember that this time they’ll have disused container ships for transport…

Austin, the migration probably won’t begin until the US and Canada are in sufficient disarray that the landings will be unopposed. As for the US and Canada, I’m far from sure either country will be around in a century, if current trends continue; both have serious pressures toward partition that I expect will keep building.

Violet, yep. Some future historian — we’ll call him Edward Orangutan — will someday pen The Decline and Fall of the Industrial Empire, and the material he puts in his first volume will be what you’re living right now.

[kenneal - lagger]

Pretty much agree with that.

All in line with Limits to Growth of which climate change is just a part. The "Peak Oil is Dead" crowd just don't get the bit about tight oil and the much lower EROEI of the stuff. Peak oil isn't dead it's just postponed for a while and while something might come along after fracking to give another slight boost to oil production it will be of smaller quantities of much lower Energy Return On Energy Invested product. It might be cheaper, although that is unlikely, but cost has nothing to do with the way in which EROEI affects the running of the world economy.

[Lord Beria3]

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-long-view/

One of Greer's finest...

[ReserveGrowthRulz]

Pretty much agree with that.

All in line with Limits to Growth of which climate change is just a part.

About that...did you ever check the references I gave you for demonstrating whether or not this statement is true?

[ReserveGrowthRulz]

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-long-view/

One of Greer's finest...

Eh. At least Kunstler has some wit about his writing. Greer just endlessly philosophizes.

[clv101]

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-long-view/

One of Greer's finest...

Finest? He doesn't say much there at all, little original... the long decent or long emergency has always seemed to be the most likely scenario.

[Lord Beria3]

His comments are always very interesting, better than the post, sometimes...

Simo, what’s going to happen? Armed mass migrations. The Third World War, the battle lines of which are forming across Eurasia as I write this, will pit jihadi Muslim armies motivated by ecological collapse against basically everyone else. That’s why Israel is sending military aid to the Philippines, why Russia and India are cozying up, and why China is treating control of its western territories as the linchpin of its geopolitical position, and so on. What do they all have in common? Ongoing problems with jihadi terrorism and militancy. I’m very glad to be on the other side of the planet…

Karim, (1) of course you’re right that jihadi militancy was originally a creation of Western intelligence agencies. Unfortunately that genie is out of the bottle now — what Western power benefited from the recent massacre in Sri Lanka? (2) That’s not my take — it’s not in the interests of the US, for example, for India to provide military aid to Myanmar and coordinate counterinsurgency actions with the Myanmar military. (3a) India until recently did a very good job of maintaining peace among its many religious communities, and so has had little trouble with jihadi militancy outside of a few border areas, where it’s been funded by rival states. The problem of course with the rise of Hindutva in India is that it’s creating fertile ground for Wahhabi and other jihad-friendly movements in the Indian Muslim community, (3b) China is fragile; that’s one of the great lessons of Chinese history. The rise of Uighur separatist groups in Chinese Turkestan doesn’t look like a threat to Beijing unless you have some sense of the history, and realize that from Beijing’s standpoint that’s an existential threat. Here again, of course, the more they clamp down, the more likely it is for Muslims in China to be radicalized as a result. (4) Europe is currently awash with Muslim immigrants, and no significant steps are being taken to keep more from following. Turkey allowed a great many Syrian refugees to cross its territory into the Balkans. As for other nations, that’s precisely it — imagine huge refugee streams, armed with weapons looted from the armed forces of failed MIddle Eastern states, streaming east toward India, northeast toward the central Asian republics, north toward Russia, northwest toward Europe. They will not stop just because somebody tells them to go home. (5) They’re not doing that now — again, check out the flood of Middle Eastern refugees into Europe — and I see no reason to think they’ll do it when it’s a matter of migrate or die.

[Lord Beria3]

Karim, I ain’t arguing. I think the result of the upcoming Third World War will be a brutal defeat of jihadi migrant armies on the eastern and northern fronts, combined and then followed by a long and equally brutal struggle against jihadi insurgencies and warbands in various parts of the world. It’s the western front — that is, western Europe — where the outcome really is in doubt.

Would agree with that.

Jihadi armies have no chance against the might of the Indian, Russian and Chinese forces.

Western Europe is a different issue as I have also written in my blog.

[Little John]

I disagree. The Western political class and their bourgeois supporters in the wider population are worse than useless. We all know that.

But, the population at large? They are far from useless. Brexit and Trump and all of the other populist democratic uprisings, quite apart from all other political considerations, are signs of the people stirring because, at some gut level they almost certainly will not be able to verbalize yet, they sense the coming danger.

[Lord Beria3]

LJ - the question is whether the miltary age male populations of western Europe are prepared to fight a multi-generational jihadi war against waves of desperate armed Muslims fleeing a dying wider ME.

I'm sorry but I don't share your optimism. The average young male italian, Spanish or German doesn't strike me as likely to handle what will be worse than WW1.

And the armies of southern Europe (barring Greece) are a joke.

https://forecastingintelligence.org/201 ... wanderung/

I've already outlined how it might play out in the decades to come here.

[Lord Beria3]

https://www.ecosophia.net/progress-and-amnesia/

Greers latest... no new revelations but not a bad read

[ReserveGrowthRulz]

https://www.ecosophia.net/progress-and-amnesia/

Greers latest... no new revelations but not a bad read

He announces that he is going to recycle some of the peak oil meme from way back!!

And then decides not to.

[Little John]

LJ - the question is whether the miltary age male populations of western Europe are prepared to fight a multi-generational jihadi war against waves of desperate armed Muslims fleeing a dying wider ME.

I'm sorry but I don't share your optimism. The average young male italian, Spanish or German doesn't strike me as likely to handle what will be worse than WW1.

And the armies of southern Europe (barring Greece) are a joke.

https://forecastingintelligence.org/201 ... wanderung/

I've already outlined how it might play out in the decades to come here.

They'll fight when their lives and those of their loved ones are at stake.

[Lord Beria3]

Some will.

Others will flee northwards which is their right as EU citizen.

Either way, it won't be enough without huge reinforcements from the rest of Europe, Russia and America.

We are talking about tens of millions of desperate military age young Muslim jihadi's.