Update from the Archdruid Greer

[Lord Beria3]

Agreed.

I think the future of Europe is likely to be shaped by two powerful forces - Islam and Russia.

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

As I noted in my blog post, by the 2030's we will likely see a mega migration of up to 200 million predominately Muslim climate refugees out of the Greater Middle East into mainly Europe. They will be armed and desperate.

They will clearly succeed in overwhelming parts of Europe, although the fighting will be intense.

Russia is a major military power, the birth rate is slowly rising and it is far better positioned to thrive in a era of scarce resources then Europe or America.

Russia will likely carve out a role as the major power in eastern Europe.

Britain will likely go its own way. Greer has written before that Britain will likely end up a broken UK, shaped by a independent Celtic fringe.

As for America who knows!

[Lord Beria3]

The fate of France, Germany and other big central European powers in an interesting one.

The rising power of populist nationalism indicates that they may have a chance of surviving as ethnically European societies as we descent into a deindustrial future.

[Lord Beria3]

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-alt-right ... sc-center/

Greer's latest...

[Little John]

Excellent article as usual. I have a small disagreement in one specific place. But, But, that's okay because it is so beautifully written.

As usual

[Lord Beria3]

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars- ... scontents/

Greer's latest.

Superb as usual.

His take on magic is thought provoking.

[Lord Beria3]

Greers latest...

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars- ... cathedral/

And my own post on technological disruption and the looming Limits to Growth endgame.

https://forecastingintelligence.org/201 ... h-endgame/

[Lord Beria3]

Taraxacum, that’s very good to hear. The use of “racist� as a dog whistle for “working class white person� has been very widespread in liberal circles for the last few decades, and it’s going to take some serious work to get past the barriers that rhetoric has raised — quite deliberately, of course — between the two halves of the underclass.

James, in the twilight years of a civilization, whatever system of economic exchange it uses is increasingly subject to being gamed by people who produce no economic value but use loopholes and weak spots in the system to extract value from it. Eventually the burden of parasitism becomes high enough that people simply walk away from it, and produce goods and services for their own use or for local exchange under the radar of the collapsing political and economic order. We’re starting to see that latter trend getting under way — there are a growing number of people in the US who are dropping out of the economy, living in squats, and working under the table — because our economy is massively gamed already. I give it fifty to one hundred fifty years, though, before the money economy stops being used in what’s now the United States; the process of decline and fall takes its merry sweet time, you know.

[Lord Beria3]

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars- ... -frog-god/

Greer's latest.

[Lord Beria3]

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars- ... -darkness/

Greer's latest. Superb.

A few of his comments are worth quoting in full...

Jack, if you’ve been reading my essays for any length of time, you should already know the answer. It’s what the statue of Apollo said to the German poet: you must change your life. Real action in the face of our ecological predicament will only take place once the activists lead the way by changing their own lifestyles to sharply decrease the burden they place on the planet. That’s not the only thing that has to be done, I get that, but until that happens nobody will take environmental activism seriously, and none of the other necessary steps will be possible.

Patricia M, that’s my take on it, at least. Keep in mind that the US didn’t start the Second World War; it was set in motion by Europeans, for whom the Great Big Battle has been a core mythologem since ancient times, and we were brought into it by the Japanese, who have a very different set of core mythic narratives that mostly involve failing heroically. (There’s a great book by Ivan Morris called The Nobility of Failure that talks about this; all the great heroes of Japanese legend failed gallantly and died, and Japan’s entire strategy in the Pacific war can be seen as a way of acting out that pattern.) Since the US is now in the process of disengaging itself from its global empire, our current crisis seems likely to play out via American archetypes rather than European ones. No, I wasn’t looking forward to Ragnarok either…

John, I should probably do another update post on the peak oil situation, shouldn’t I? The metrics that matter are that we’re still pumping, year after year, more petroleum than we discover, and having to cycle more and more of the resulting energy back into the process of extracting it. The cycle that results should be familiar by now: a price spike, demand destruction, a frantic scurrying to bring in even lower-grade resources than before, a price crash, a period when prices stay low, then the ragged upward movement that leads in due time to another price spike. We’re in the ragged upward movement now.

Bori, as the US withdraws from its imperial role, there are going to be huge (or, ahem “yuuuuuge�) shifts in the distribution of power in the world, and some of those will play out on the battlefield or in other, equally destructive ways. There’s also the ecological situation, which is not good; all those years of the Right insisting that the environment does’t matter, while the Left made all the right noises but did nothing to change things, have piled up a really hefty bill, some of which is coming due right now. But I think you’ll be disappointed if you wait for the One Big Battle that’s so central a theme in Old World culture.

Kurt, without fossil fuels to prop it up, our entire way of life will come crashing down. We could have weaned ourselves off fossil fuels if we’d followed through on the promising developments of the 1970s, but we did the opposite, boosting our fossil fuel consumption per capita way above what it was in that decade. Now our politicians are trapped; keeping the beast fed requires more and more drastic measures, and even those are just a matter of buying a little more time at the cost of an even worse outcome down the road. Any president who let peak oil and peak coal run their course would be out of office at the next election, and any party that did the same thing would suffer an equivalent fate, because fossil fuels are what keep most Americans living in conditions better than those on Native American reservations — and you know as well as I do how many middle class Americans would be willing to accept a drastic decline in their standards of living in order to give their descendants a better future.

Denys, nope. We screwed that pooch good and proper. At this point the Sino-Russian alliance is an enduring thing, and over the next half century or so every other nation in the world will have to reorient their foreign policy to align with it or oppose it, the way every nation in the world had to orient their foreign policy to align with the US or oppose it during our era of empire.

RogerCO, I think you may have misunderstood what I wrote. Trump’s policies are shutting off the downward pressure on wages and benefits, by using tariffs to make offshoring less profitable, and by shutting down the influx of illegal immigrants. Thus people in the working classes are already benefiting from more jobs and the beginnings of upward pressure on wages and benefits.

Mark, I don’t think Trump necessarily means to bring about a post-imperial America. I think that he’s going to end up doing it whether he intends it or not, and some of his policies — especially the end of one-way free trade agreements and the pressure on the EU to take over the costs of its own defense — are accelerating that process to the point at which it’s going to be impossible to stop. It’s precisely by the repeal of regulations, rather than the enactment of new laws, that he seems to be having the biggest impact so far — but we’ll see.

David, of course they hate nationalism. They’ve been taught to think of themselves as a supranational ruling caste. Beyond that, there’s a profound hatred of difference in elite culture these days; the idea that there are actual, enduring differences between people that result from something other than education and social class is utterly rejected by the ruling classes. We must all be interchangeable parts!

Michael, well, we’ll see, won’t we? My take is that the current fad for internet censorship is one of the last bellows of a dying beast; having failed to maintain control of the collective discourse, the failing managerial aristocracy is trying to silence competing voices by brute force, thus showing the weakness of their position. My guess is that we’re not too far from seeing the big tech monopolies broken up the way the telephone monopoly was.

[Lord Beria3]

https://forecastingintelligence.org/201 ... epwalkers/

Latest blog post - on the implications of climate change on the future global economy.

[emordnilap]

https://forecastingintelligence.org/201 ... epwalkers/

Latest blog post - on the implications of climate change on the future global economy.

According to a recent report by an international team of scientists, under current trends, the Earth is heading towards a “hothouse climate�, which will see huge swathes of the planet become uninhabitable and 200ft sea level rises. Crop failures, rising sea levels and extreme heat waves and droughts will cause immense long-term damage to the foundations of our globalised economy.

Yes but it's not affecting me (i.e. the ordinary western citizen), right now, right here (well, maybe a little). Which is why I (that same citizen) refuse to even think about it - and that's a long way from doing anything.

Is there any wonder we're fecked?

[Lord Beria3]

Agree.

But it will soon will enough!!!

[BritDownUnder]

https://forecastingintelligence.org/201 ... epwalkers/

Latest blog post - on the implications of climate change on the future global economy.

Very interesting history of climate change from that New York Times article you posted.
Supposedly none other than Dr Edward Teller told a US Petroleum conference in the late 1950s, that he was guest speaker at, all about climate change.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. First of all, these energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels. [....] But I would [...] like to mention another reason why we probably have to look for additional fuel supplies. And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. [....] Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. [....] The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it?

Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect [....] It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.

[Lord Beria3]

Latest Greer post is on Brexit, which I have posted on the Brexit thread.

However, key quotes I will quote from Greer's comments on this thread...

https://www.ecosophia.net/an-astrologic ... /#comments

Millennial, remember that the British upper classes are divided between the managerial classes and the old moneyed classes, and these do not necessarily share the same interest. Rees-Mogg seems to be positioning himself as the voice of the old moneyed classes, and since the managerial classes have made such prats of themselves of late, his chances of ending up leading the Tories are fairly high.

“but I’d put my money on the House of Windsor remaining on the throne for a long time to come.�

[Lord Beria3]

https://www.ecosophia.net/an-astrologic ... ress-2018/

Greer's latest...