PowerSwitch

Surely we have reached some sort of watershed moment here. In the US Trump is rolling back environmental legislation as swiftly as his pen can move. The French are asking the EU to "indefinitely delay green rules for business" (https://www.politico.eu/article/france- ... -business/). And now we have our own Labour government refusing to make COP commitments legally binding, and preparing the ground for a u-turn on Heathrow expansion.

Until now we have been in a position where nothing was being done about long-term net climate change, but there were accounting con-tricks like Net Zero in place which at least made it look like something was being done, and was at least slowing the rate of climate change. Now it seems we have reached a point where two things have happened -- the first is Trump's victory in the US and the second is that all across the Western world growth is proving ever more elusive. And this means that even the pretence is falling away -- it is now crystal clear that western governments will do anything at all to keep growth going for a little bit longer.

What I don't understand is how this doesn't translate into a deeper economic meltdown as economic forecasters are forced to incorporate the consequences of failing to stop climate change into their models. At what point does the entire insurance industry become untenable, to take just one example?

There is also the issue of what happens next...when even these desperate last ditch attempts to sustain growth prove to be false dawns even if they aren't total failures. At what point does the politics start to seriously change?

Peak oil (Nov 2018) enters the chat. Fossil fuels are no route to renewed economic growth. Extreme weather, crop failures mega-draughts, floods and the rest of it will rapidly outpace what 'growth' is achieved.

We are seeing the acceleration of the effects of the limits to growth, right at the point of where the original study said they would occur. It was always going to be a tragedy foretold, the inevitable effect of exponential growth where there was a delay between the benefits of exploiting resources and the negative impacts of their waste streams entering the environment. Fractional reserve banking has allowed the human race to live beyond its means for long enough for its controllers to believe that the debt would never need to be repaid, and even if they are now realizing the entire global economy is on the brink of collapse, they know that the human race is so far past the point of sustainability that a financial reset would simply trigger the collapse sooner. We are seeing more and more populist, right wing governments as people realize that the status quo is unsustainable, but cannot (or are not allowed to) comprehend that their future is going to materially poorer, if they have any future at all.

Environmentalists have always been ignored, or laughed at, but now they are increasingly being vilified, arrested, locked up. Soon they will be simply disappeared, as the tech bros who control social media tweak their algorithms to ensure their voices are lost.

The collapse is coming. The major powers are maneuvering over the control of the remaining major resource centres. In Russia, human life is becoming cheap again. It always was in many parts of the third world. Soon, it will be so here as well.

Sleep well, keep your head down, make quiet preparations so that you and yours are prepared for the hard times, but not so openly as to become a target for the desperate or the violent. Treat your neighbours well, make yourself useful so when the time comes, they will treat you as family.

We are seeing more and more populist, right wing governments as people realize that the status quo is unsustainable, but cannot (or are not allowed to) comprehend that their future is going to materially poorer, if they have any future at all.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. As things stand these "populists" are, for the most part, socially very right wing (anti-woke and anti-immigration for cultural reasons) but they are also allied to the economic right -- to the super-rich (or at least some of them). They can deliver on the anti-woke agenda, and with sufficient will they can deliver on immigration, but I don't think they can do very much, if anything at all, to improve the economic wellbeing of most of society. The only way to do that involves a major levelling down of the top, which is something I just can't see being delivered by people like Trump and Farage. So the question is what happens when people realise that the "populist right" can't preserve their living standards either. I guess that either the economic left adopts a social agenda that is more like the populists, or some new political force will emerge which combines the social policies of the populists with economic policies designed to eliminate the parasitical super-rich and use the money to keep the bottom half of society afloat for a bit longer. But that could turn out to be completely wrong...