Hope for the New Year.
Not too long ago—back before Covid took me out for the holidays— I attended the BUG’s latest fiction launch, sharing drinks with a horde of her fans and students from all walks of life. One such fan was a journalist, with whom the conversation turned to environmental apocalypse and the various ways it might yet be staved off. (This was only fitting: the BUG’s new novelette—“All the Songs”, in Fusion Fragment—is the most hauntingly beautiful celebration of Human extinction you’re ever likely to read.)
The journo had grave misgivings about my suggestion that, for starters, the lot of us could just stop breeding. If you’re only including the childless, she pointed out, you’re going to be having a very small conversation. One might argue that her own, somewhat more outwardly-directed solution— guillotine the plutocrats—suffers from similarly limited appeal. (Although maybe not. It’s hard to find fault, for example, with Luigi Mangione’s approach; since those ironically-named “health care” CEO’s clearly aren’t bothered by either the deaths they’ve caused or by next-of-kin tramping around with protest signs, it seems only systematic to test whether the prospect of ending up dead themselves might motivate a change in behavior.) In either case, it seems pretty clear that the time for conversations— small or large— has pretty much run its course. It’s all just talk.
Behold, the New Year:
The nuclear codes are about to move back from the hands of the doddering old fool into those of the stumbling demented tantrum-child. The Democrats— having repeatedly characterized Trump as a “fascist”—are now in the awkward position of enabling a “smooth transition” to said fascism because that is how the Great Democracies work.
Ukraine is fucked.
Gaza is even more fucked (not that this is much of a change from Genocide Joe’s regime, admittedly).
The chances of nuclear war are higher than they’ve been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Most importantly (with the possible exception of the whole nuclear war thing), the environment is fucked. 2024 closed out as the hottest year not just in recorded history, but in the past 125,000 years. We’ve been consistently over 1.5°C for a solid year now, notwithstanding the Hope Police’s strident insistence that we really haven’t blown past that threshold until we’ve done it for a bunch more years. Carbon emissions continued to increase in 2024 (although I’m certain that they’ll start to come down once the Orange Imbecile puts his Drill Baby Drill policy into play).
Mix in the various plagues and pandemics still doing the rounds (even if most jurisdictions have stopped releasing data on such things because if you admit we’re still in the throes of a pandemic you might have to be seen to do something about it, and the The Economy won’t stand for another shutdown) or waiting in the wings; the S’Asian flash floods and the Mexican killer heat waves and the firestorms and droughts raging from California to Australia; the revelation that traditional carbon sinks such as the Amazon and the Arctic are now net carbon producers; and the ongoing catastrophic extinction rates of all those thousands of species we really don’t give a shit about because they sure as shit were never Made In God’s Image—put all that together and the year we just crawled out of was pretty much the worst ever.
And yet, looking forward to what’s coming this year, 2024 represents the last of The Good Old Days. We’re headed for 2.7-3.1°C by century’s end if current trends continue. Current trends will not continue, of course. As of January 6th, they’re going to get a lot worse.
If any of you can find any legitimate good news in the face of all this—and I’m talking about reasonable cause for hope here, not some feel-good story about rescued hedgehogs or found cats—by all means let me know. Don’t bother mentioning the plummeting cost and improving economics of renewable energy[1], though, unless you include strategies that don’t turn the planet into a moonscape from mining the requisite minerals. (Apparently it would take half the world’s current lithium production and twice the world’s current cobalt production just to electrify the UK grid. Now scale that up to the rest of the planet). Don’t feed me fairy tales about giant pie plates in the sky, designed to reduce solar input without requiring anyone to give up their super-yachts or private jets. In fact, don’t talk about any technological fix that won’t fall instantly afoul of Jevon’s Paradox, that will be sold as a way to Buy Time To Save The World but really end up as just another excuse to do fuck-all. Talk to me about behavioral solutions. Give me hope by showing me evidence that Humanity can change its nature.
Because honestly, the only hope I have now can be found in the fact that the Earth has already endured five major extinction events— and that new, gloriously-diverse biospheres have always evolved in their wake. It may take twenty million years after we’re gone, but the Earth will shake off this disease. It will recover.
The only hope I have is that the biosphere will survive long enough for us to go extinct.
Which, fun fact, still hasn’t put a dent on fossil energy production, instead merely adding to it. ↑
Yeah. Pretty sure we’re fucked. But the ball of rock, and some bacteria and so on, will still be here! So, Yay.
Whatever fuckery we end up offing ourselves by, I hope the octopus make it through okay. Maybe crabs too, because they’re funny.
I’m holding out hope for the corvids, though I admit it miiiiiiiiiiight be a tad tricky for them to evolve dextrous extremities on limbs that have already evolved for flying.
Considering all the radioactive and chemical pollution that’s going to result from the collapse of civilization, it’s very unlikely that anything but protozoa survives. And I’m not sure even about protozoa.
The biosphere will survive long enough for us to go extinct. Just what that biosphere looks like is another question, though, and the fact that the feedback loop for greenhouse gases will continue for centuries or longer after we’ve breathed our last is… well, listen to me, starting to sound like you.
I remember a thing I heard a while back, “who does this plot of land truly belong to?”
“whoever can actual ‘hold’ it…”
long time fan btw.
Alternatively: “He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing”…
I keep getting duplicates, dunno why..
My messages appear only after a huge delay, and this website doesn’t show anything to confirm that they were actually posted when I click “Post comment”.
Whoever made this website, they aren’t any good at software engineering.
Some of your comments get caught in moderation, so they don’t appear until I check them manually. Since I’ve been sick for the past three weeks, those manual checks haven’t been especially frequent. Since said sickness has put me behind schedule on a bunch of other tasks I’m supposed to be working on, that’s not likely to change much in the near future.
It’s simply strange that it doesn’t even confirm that the comments were posted. In any case, it shouldn’t be like that.
By the way, and I’m sure a lot of people here have heard about this; but i find r/collapse a really interesting place to read at times; especially LastWeekInCollapse’s posts, very very well researched, every week, a new post is released that goes through the beautiful news and happenings of the world, and when the year is over, there are some extra posts; that compile the whole year (updated to actuality, i believe), the last one i’ve yet to read is the one about Diseases (yey): https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1hs49s8/last_year_in_collapse_disease_2024/
Don’t read r/solarpunk though, that will ruin your day
I suspect your first instinct will be to dismiss this*, but hear me out; this is my research area, FWIW, so I’m probably at least not making the most naive errors here.
Whether or not we consider it true intelligence, current AI is already accelerating scientific research, both with special-purpose tools like AlphaFold and with general-purpose LLMs (some recent papers: 1, 2). Importantly, this holds true particularly for AI research itself. As a result, we’re likely to see AI capabilities rapidly accelerate, and there’s no particular reason to expect human-level intelligence to be a cap on that.
IMO there are two most-probable outcomes of that with respect to the climate:
In either of those cases, climate change is no longer the central crux for the future; either we get a good solution or we all die (and stop emitting carbon in the process).
There are a few ways this could fail, for example:
Hopefully it’s clear — given that I’m pointing to ‘everybody dies’ as one fairly likely class of outcome — that I’m not just telling a Pollyanna story here. Nor am I a booster for the tech industry; I’d personally advocate for regulation to slow AI development way down until/unless we have better safety solutions.
But on net, I think it’s non-trivial reason for hope. I certainly don’t think we’ll see behavioral solutions, at least not until the effects of climate change start to bite much harder, and at that point it may well be too late for humanity although, as you say, hopefully not for the biosphere.
I’m happy to dive (much) deeper into all this it it would be helpful.
* Why do I suspect your first instinct will be to dismiss it? There’s a small but noisy chorus of academics (mostly linguists) convincing people that current AI approaches can’t possibly be intelligent because they’re not embodied or grounded in a language community, and so can’t actually be understanding or using language at all. For many smart, well-informed people who are reasonably suspicious of Silicon Valley’s Next Big Thing, those arguments seem compelling. But the best evidence suggests that they’re just mistaken; I’m happy to point to some of the reasons why if that’s of interest. Another reason is arguments that we run out of compute or electricity, but algorithmic improvements are resulting in 3x more efficiency per year, so that wouldn’t be likely to slow things down for too long (and also the frontier is plausibly shifting to approaches like inference-time compute that aren’t just about scaling up the standard training).
I’d be fascinated to learn more about this. While happily acknowledging the leaps and bounds AI has contributed to in everything from protein folding to wildlife tracking, from what I’ve read LLMs are hitting a plateau because they’ve already digested the internet and are running out of new training data (which as I understand it is vital for further progress).
They’d have to be far better, given that current CC tech would need to scale up by a factor of millions just to keep up with current emissions (much less putting a dent into the backlog). And while I’m absolutely on board with the idea that things smarter than us can see solutions our baseline brains could never conjure up (hell, half my fiction is based on that premise), physics itself imposes a hard limit on what even god-like intellect can accomplish. If I find myself naked at the bottom of a ten-meter pit dug by lemurs, it may not matter how much smarter I am than those furry little guys; it may just be physically impossible to generate leaping hind limbs or antigrav tech given the resources available. (Although admittedly now I’m thinking a sufficiently smart hole-dweller might learn the lemur language and, through clever exploitation of lemur psychology, coax them into dropping me down a vine or something. So I guess I’m not married to this particular misgiving.)
In the meantime, though, the water and energy costs involved in generating text-to-video of anthropomorphic cats are so huge that the tech bros are literally recommissioning old nuclear reactors. So far at least, AI seems to be contributing far more to the problem than to any solutions, 3X annual efficiency notwithstanding.
I’m certainly not dismissing what you’re saying. While I think it only makes sense to be profoundly skeptical of the tech-bro party line, I also don’t have much patience for the “LLMs can’t be truly intelligent like us Humans” crowd. In my experience, that group doesn’t really appreciate how bot-like most Human cognition is; they seem to assume we’ve been gifted with some kind of magical fairy consciousness-dust sprinkled throughout our grey matter that somehow makes us special. And I truly hope you’re right.
But at its base, your cause for hope seems to be another iteration of the Overlord aliens from Clarke’s Childhood’s End: godlike beings who show up in the nick of time and say “You’re fucking things up, so we’ll take over to save your asses.” I’m not saying it can’t happen. I am saying we probably shouldn’t be relying on it as Plan A.
Reasonable cause for hope, though? Like rolling a D20 and saying Hey, there’s as much of a chance we get a natural 20 as any other number? Sure.
Anyhow. As I said: eager to learn more, if you feel like posting.
The best hope is probably for exactly what you said: “the lot of us could just stop breeding”. The demographic transition seems to be faster and more durable, and in more places, than I think pretty much anyone expected. Covid and associated global shortages seems to have only accelerated it. If that keeps up there’s a chance – not while you or I are alive, but for the future – that things might slow down.
> for starters, the lot of us could just stop breeding
> CEO’s clearly aren’t bothered by either the deaths they’ve caused
You don’t mind if I call a spade a spade? It looks like you have to decide what you actually believe. If you believe that we have to reduce world population, this guy was doing the right thing (even though for all the wrong reasons).
If by “this guy” you mean Mangione, I’m pretty clearly on board with testing his hypothesis. If you mean the CEO―i.e., I should be applauding him because his policies result in a culling of the herd―I think you’re confusing numerical kill count with environmental impact. It’s been convincingly demonstrated that the zero-pointers have an exponentially greater environmental bootprint than the rest of us: so killing one such CEO probably confers a greater environmental benefit than killing a hundred of his victims.
High value targets. Those are the spades we’re talking about.
> I think you’re confusing numerical kill count with environmental impact
Yes, I mean those CEO’s (particularly Brian Thompson). You blamed them for deaths caused by them rather than their personal environmental impact.
So, I didn’t confuse nothing.
> exponentially greater environmental bootprint than the rest of us
I can easily imagine that one rich guy has worse environmental impact than hundreds of average people, or possibly thousands. But exponentially, i.e. indefinitely? That doesn’t sound feasible to me. I’d like to see some sources.
“Exponentially” simply means an order of magnitude or more. Who told you it means “indefinitely”?
I never heard anyone using “exponentially” this way before. Normally, it means that growth accelerates quickly.
Speaking the language of science, even if we use 2 as the base, someone who has 100 times more money than you would have 5.3762343e+43 bootprint than you. And that means the number with 43 zeroes. I’m sure that this is not true.
I’m not sure why you’re so hopeful another sentient being could pull this “civilization” malarkay off better.
From the way I understand it, competition from fast-expanding species will drive more restrained species to extinction, and the chaotic nature of natural environments makes slow planning for delayed gratification a hard sell.
And we all know that evolution isn’t survival of the fittest, but death of the inadequate. The only traits selected against are those that get you killed within a span of a generation.
Perfectly fine if you’re in a natural environment, red in tooth and claw, where there’s fuck all leeway for a faulty batch to slip past QC.
Not when you’re dealing with a climate collapse,a one-time event that takes multiple generations to set up and can’t be stopped when it gets going.
It seems to me highly unlikely to me that a species would be able to reach the level of technology that allows it to greatly influence its planet without also developing the sort of mind that would ensure its self-destruction.
A pretty grim thought but I can put a neat spin on it- I’ve solved the Fermi paradox! I’m sure that thought will comfort me as I die unloved, unmourned, and unremembered when the other shoe drops.
I think that’s actually a pretty common solution to the Fermi Paradox―but who said anything about “civilization”? Sentient life has existed on this plant for millions upon millions of years; it’s been “civilized” for what, 11,000 years tops?
I once interned at a company that is developing a promising carbon capture technology. The only catch is that it was only good for at capturing CO2 directly from emissions sources. I had a chat with some of the lead engineers about Direct Air Capture (DAC) applications, and phrases like “inlet size of 4km2” were spoken completely straight-faced. 420+ppm might be terrible for the climate, but it’s a real pain to sift out of the air in any great quantity.
…Sorry, you were hoping for good news?
Technically, yes. But ’twas a faint and forlorn hope.
“Gaza is even more fucked (not that this is much of a change from Genocide Joe’s regime, admittedly)”
The war in Gaza ends as soon as Hamas returns the hostages (what’s left of them) and surrenders. At present, a Jew walking through Gaza unarmed is a dead Jew, in the same way all those Jews at a music festival in Israel are dead Jews.
If the Israeli’s were trying to commit genocide then they would have to be highly incompetent, which they are not. They are engaged in a conflict against several groups of people all of whom would, if given the opportunity, kill every Jew on the planet. Those groups would commit genocide if given the opportunity. They cannot be given that chance.
“Me against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, my cousin and I against a stranger,” is not a Hebrew saying. It is Arabic, likely Bedouin, and is a partial explanation of why this region of the world seems incapable of creating democratic governments.
If someone sneaks into your home, rapes and kills members of your family, and then runs back to Vancouver, you are completely justified in hunting them down and taking them out. You are not justified in nuking the entire lower mainland of BC, starving its civilian inhabitants, systematically destroying its educational and health care infrastructure, targeting journalists, telling the homeless survivors that they must congregate in “safe zones” that you specify, and then bombing the shit out of those safe zones as well.
Hamas killed 1,139 Israelis in their sneak attack. The IDF had killed over 41,000, minimum, as of last August. That’s a win on points by an order of magnitude right there, although of course casualties have increased in the four months since (it’s admittedly difficult to know by how much, since the Israelis have essentially eliminated the journalistic presence).
So when Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Lemkin Institute for the Prevention of Genocide, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights and two UN committees―to name but a handful—conclude that the events in Gaza constitute a genocide; when a dozen Jewish organizations speak out publicly against Netanyahu’s treatment of Gaza’s inhabitants; when the International Criminal Court issues arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for Crimes Against Humanity; when the International Court of Justice approves ongoing proceedings against the Israeli government on charges of genocide―then I’m sorry, but I give all those considered opinions significantly more weight than Phil’s, even if a bunch of gutless ‘Murrican politicians do continue to waffle and weave on the subject because they don’t want to piss off the evangelical vote.
I don’t see how the journo’s counter that, “If you’re only including the childless, then you’re going to be having a very small conversation,” makes sense. Why would you only include the childless in the conversation? A family with six kids could hear the appeals for reduced population and advise those kids not to have as many kids as they did. Also, most people in their early 20s who live in developed nations are childless, and would be a potent group to have in this conversation before they age, and have kids. Admittedly, it may be too late to save future generations from hardship, but that too seems like a reason not to procreate. What am I missing here?
On a related note, I continue to have some trouble reconciling your (eminently defensible) view that global population needs to contract, with your concern about “the various plagues and pandemics still doing the rounds.”
I think yo may have misunderstood her intent. She was critiquing my position, by saying that if you only include antinatalists in your group, you’re gonna have a very small (hence, ineffective) group. She’s not wrong.
Most of the plagues and pandemics doing the rounds these days are zoonotics. They’re wiping out nonhuman animals as well. But yes, you’re right overall; I tend to regard current outbreaks as a kind of reap-what-you-sow thing. In fact, with RFK Jr. poised to become Secretary of Health and Human Services, I anticipate a kind of epidemiological self-selection process in the near future. Antivaxxers will be free to snort bleach or stick UV lights up their asses; people with a modicum of scientific sense will presumably not be prevented from continuing to get their needles. When the dust settles, my guess is that the average intelligence of the US citizenry will have increased slightly.
As this article shows, even back in 2019 people were aware that renewables take an ungodly amount of environmentally destructive resource extraction to pull off: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/06/the-path-to-clean-energy-will-be-very-dirty-climate-change-renewables/
Over at A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, Devereaux describes the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as basically being a refusal to recognize that change was possible. The Romans kept fighting each other in civil wars from the third century on, but because the empire was still standing and had stood for so long they were sure that it could never actually end, so they made minimal efforts to address the problems this inflicted on the empire over time. It was a mentality they had up until the point it actually ended, and in many ways even beyond the end, as they were sure they could restore it.
I can’t help but feel as if we treat our fossil fueled industrial civilization this way. It has been so successful and has expanded for so long, that we think its problems are ones we can deal with over time and not seriously address now. What depresses me is that most people will keep saying that if we just exploit the environment a bit more we will eventually be able to save it, and will probably keep saying that as the climate starts to undergo shifts even larger than what is going on now.