Hope for the New Year.

The illo for “All the Songs”―assembled by me, actually, using elements courtesy of Liam Andrew and Dai Mar Tamarack.

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.


  1. Which, fun fact, still hasn’t put a dent on fossil energy production, instead merely adding to it.



This entry was posted on Friday, January 3rd, 2025 at 1:10 pm and is filed under In praise of biocide, politics, rant, scilitics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

60 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Sally McBride
Guest
Sally McBride
3 days ago

Yeah. Pretty sure we’re fucked. But the ball of rock, and some bacteria and so on, will still be here! So, Yay.

Thorn
Guest
Thorn
16 hours ago
Reply to  Sally McBride

I’m a deeply optimistic man; I suffer from the Panglossian delusion that it might have some pigeons, foxes, and weeds on it too!

Diego
Guest
Diego
3 days ago

Whatever fuckery we end up offing ourselves by, I hope the octopus make it through okay. Maybe crabs too, because they’re funny.

Thorn
Guest
Thorn
2 days ago
Reply to  Diego

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.

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 day ago
Reply to  Diego

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.

Derryl
Guest
Derryl
3 days ago

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.

Bren
Guest
Bren
3 days ago

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.

Bren
Guest
Bren
3 days ago

I keep getting duplicates, dunno why..

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 day ago
Reply to  Bren

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.

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 day ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

It’s simply strange that it doesn’t even confirm that the comments were posted. In any case, it shouldn’t be like that.

Greg Guy
Guest
Greg Guy
1 day ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

you ever considered going the substack route?

Greg Guy
Guest
Greg Guy
1 day ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Ah, ok. I thought you could post your stuff for free on substack as well.

Leszek Ciesielski
Guest
Leszek Ciesielski
18 hours ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Substack is very big on saying whatever the fuck their creators want… to the point of defending neo-nazis using their platform. For quite a few users, that’s a tad too far. For me personally as well.

Fatman
Guest
Fatman
16 hours ago
Reply to  Andrei

It will notify you that you’re posting a duplicate comment even if your original comment isn’t visible yet. A blink-and-you-miss-it red flag pops up.

Thorn
Guest
Thorn
23 hours ago
Reply to  Bren

The lack of any confirmation that your comment got submitted is probably a factor, at least for some people. I’ve certainly clicked the post button more than once a few times.

zenAndroid
Guest
zenAndroid
3 days ago

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

Egg Syntax
Guest
Egg Syntax
2 days ago

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:

  1. As you’ve recently linked to Geoff Hinton saying, there’s a substantial chance that AI kills us all.
  2. Rapid advances in science and technology result in a solution to climate change, eg far better carbon capture technology. I think that a substantial majority of humans would like to see the environment flourish as long as it’s not expensive or personally inconvenient, so a truly good technological solution would probably be adopted.

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:

  • The current approach to AI stalls out. That seems unlikely for various reasons I can go into if you’d like.
  • We all die in a way that also does irreparable damage to the biosphere. This one does seem pretty plausible (and is part of why I’ve shifted my focus fully to AI safety research).

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).

Egg Syntax
Guest
Egg Syntax
20 hours ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Thanks for the thoughtful response!

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).

There’s necessarily some uncertainty around all this stuff because the big labs are keeping quiet about exactly what they’re doing (and open models are somewhat behind). That uncertainty seems to often get filled by industry journalists speculating wildly; the recent spate of articles about how scaling has stopped working has been an interesting example of that IMHO. My main reasons for expecting scaling to continue:

  • I tend to trust Epoch’s analyses, and even at the low end of their estimate, there are another few OOMs of data to be extracted from the internet.
  • Although the research has been mixed, I think the balance of evidence (eg 1, 2) suggests that models can train on (model-generated) synthetic data without suffering the sort of collapse of quality that early synthetic-data approaches did.
  • Even if the standard pre-training approach did cap out, there are an increasing number of other approaches, in particular applying more compute at inference time (like o1), that substantially improve capabilities by building on top of those pre-trained models .

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.

Yeah, totally fair. My intuition is that there must be technologies for dealing with the climate that are many orders of magnitude better than what we’ve got currently, but I don’t have any evidence for that (or any particular expertise) and I definitely see how reasonable people’s intuitions on it could differ.

So far at least, AI seems to be contributing far more to the problem than to any solutions, 3X annual efficiency notwithstanding.

Totally granted. My guess is that we’re not too far from seeing some important upsides (a couple that seem important to me are Diamond-Age-ish lifelong tutors for every kid, and company / emotional care for the lonely elderly who don’t currently have any better options (obviously that’s far from an ideal solution for the elderly, just seems much better than the status quo)). But environmental upsides, if they happen, seem further away.

In my experience, that group doesn’t really appreciate how bot-like most Human cognition is

A short piece on this that I love is Sarah Constantin’s ‘Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences’.

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.”

Yeah, absolutely agreed that it pattern-matches that (although in my preferred future they’re less independent godlike beings and more non-sentient problem-solving tools that are really good — not that I think AI sentience is impossible, but I’d like to see us steer clear of it until we have a much better idea what we’re doing). At the same time, I think that’s the direction that the evidence points.

I’m not saying it can’t happen. I am saying we probably shouldn’t be relying on it as Plan A.

Absolutely! If our species of ape didn’t suck at coordination we would have done the sane things like cut carbon emissions quite some time ago. But that reasonable Plan A just looks to me like it’s going to fail badly since we do in fact suck at (among other things) coordination.

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.

I know. I just don’t have anything more hopeful to offer.

Anonymous
Guest
Anonymous
2 days ago

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.

Greg Guy
Guest
Greg Guy
1 day ago
Reply to  Anonymous

why would this make a difference? The problem is not the mass of individuals getting by on a bag of rice a day, but the small minority enjoying their great Western lifestyle – full of holidays abroad, fruit and veg all year round, streaming entertainment, and so on.

Anyway, population rates have been decreasing that many countries now will face significant population decreases in the coming decades. So what? The problems started when we already at 5-6 billion. Even if we do stop breeding, 8 billion is way over our planet’s ecology to sustain. £ billion is probably too much if you want to enjoy your steaks, holidays, video games, etc.

Controlled giga-death might be a possibility, but I for one have no idea how that could possibly go peacefully enough to keep current industrial civilisation from collapsing anyway.

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
2 days ago

> 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).

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 day ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

> 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.

Andrei
Guest
Andrei
1 day ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

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.

anon
Guest
anon
1 day ago
Reply to  Andrei

“Normally, it means that growth accelerates quickly.”

It only means this if attached to a verb like “grows” or “increases,” e.g. “the rate of change increased exponentially.” Saying an environmental footprint is exponentially greater than another isn’t the same as saying that an environmental footprint is growing exponentially.

Thorn
Guest
Thorn
2 days ago

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.

Thorn
Guest
Thorn
23 hours ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Ah fuck, my poor phrasing catches up with me again. Musta’ had the word “civilization” stuck in my head from reading a substack about ecological overshoot (https://predicament.substack.com/ for anyone interested) that throws the word around a lot.

I guess by “civilization” I was referring to any assemblage of organisms capable of greatly influencing its environment via conscious choice?

Hunter-Killer
Guest
Hunter-Killer
1 day ago

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?

Chrome Lord
Guest
Chrome Lord
1 day ago
Reply to  Hunter-Killer

Even kids shows roast the hell of all this carbon capture scheme, episode “Christmas crusaders” of TTG.

Phil
Guest
Phil
1 day ago

“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.

Fatman
Guest
Fatman
1 day ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

“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 forgot the part where that “someone” is in fact sneaking into their former home, which you acquired through pillage and murder, having broken multiple multilateral agreements in the process. But otherwise an apt comparison.

Greg Guy
Guest
Greg Guy
22 hours ago
Reply to  Fatman

I would also add that revenge implies a power differential. The weak are rarely capable of exacting revenge on a more powerful attacker.

Phil
Guest
Phil
18 hours ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

I guess we’ll have to remain on opposing sides on this one. I see it differently (and differently from Amnesty and another organization not named above from which I’ve redirected long-standing monthly donations because of their positions).

Greg Guy
Guest
Greg Guy
1 day ago
Reply to  Phil

That’s really funny, new-Nazis also use the same argument about why the Holocaust never happened. Look at all the Jews around, they say, the Nazis would have to have been highly incompetent.

At the very least Gaza is an attempt at ethnic cleansing, and it’s not the first time Israel has tried that against the Palestinians. Any particular reason you think history only started on October 7?

Phil
Guest
Phil
18 hours ago
Reply to  Greg Guy

I’m aware of the history. How far back do you want to go?

Regarding recent history, nearly everyone living in that region was born after 1948.

Phil
Guest
Phil
1 day ago

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.”

Phil
Guest
Phil
18 hours ago
Reply to  Peter Watts

Ah, yes, very small group. All I read these days is people worrying about low birthrates undermining our ongoing economic Ponzi scheme. Conversations should expand the anti-natalist group, but I expect that expansion to severely lag events.

Zack
Guest
Zack
1 day ago

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.

Chrome Lord
Guest
Chrome Lord
1 day ago
Reply to  Zack

[Nuclear energy apologist grunting in a distance]

Zack
Guest
Zack
21 hours ago
Reply to  Chrome Lord

Personally, I am a big believer in nuclear power as a way to both get energy and reduce gases that contribute to climate change. But despite all of the research that has been poured into nuclear power plants, so many have either been decommissioned or construction on new ones is so slow that I can’t take it seriously.