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Seeing the Future Dimly

Wednesday, August 8th, 2012

By David L. Brown

One of the news websites, Fox News (here), today featured excerpts from a number of predictions made 25 years ago by “science thinkers,” predicting conditions in our time of 2012. I recognize the names of most of these “science thinkers” and they are actually “science fiction writers,” but that’s okay because they’re in the business of imagining the future as much as anyone. I’ve always had a passing interest in futurism, the attempt to predict how things will be in future times. In general, these tend to be wildly inaccurate due to the many uncertainties and the phenomenon of straight line thinking. Too often futurists tend to look at what’s been happening recently and simply project a straight line into the future.

Even a cursory look at history will knock enough holes in this procedure to make Swiss cheeses look like solid objects. Imagine the application of straight line thinking to the U.S. economy in the summer of 1929, the likelihood of war in Europe in 1913, the future well-being of the little Roman village of Pompeii in 78 AD (Mount Vesuvius erupted the following year), and so many more examples of unexpected and unpredictable events that dramatically change the future.

One thing that struck me abut these predictions was that they were for the most part pessimistic, in contrast with the usual fol-de-rol about a Jetsons future with flying cars and an abundance of everything. Here are some excerpts with my comments:

Isaac Asimov: “Assuming we haven’t destroyed ourselves in a nuclear war, there will be 8-10 billion of us on this planet and widespread hunger.”

Isaac’s view was fairly accurate, even though he was a little on the low side on population (it’s actually just something over 7 billion). He was dead on about the looming hunger, hastened by this year’s worldwide drought.

Jack Williamson: “If we had a time-phone, now in 1987, we would beg you to forgive us. We have burdened you with impossible debts, wasted and polluted the planet that should have been your rich heritage, left you instead a dreadful legacy of ignorance, want, and war.”

Of all the predictions, I nominate this one as the most accurate. I have expressed similar thoughts myself, many times. Anyone who looks around the world today with open eyes can recognize Williamson’s vision of our time.
Sheldon Glashow: “The American economy will have experienced a gentle yet relentless decline. Our children will not live such comfortable lives as we do. The spread between the rich and the poor will have grown, and crime will have become so prevalent as to threaten the social fabric. The rich and the poor will form 2 armed camps.”
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Posted in Conflict and War, Energy Technology, Essays and Opinion, Extinction, Famine, Fossil Fuels, Medicine, Politics, Population Issues, Resource Depletion, Space Exploration, Technology | Comments Off

A Tragedy in the Making

Wednesday, July 25th, 2012

By David L. Brown

As drought and heat continue to destroy a significant portion of the US crop, a large tranche of corn continues to be mandated for use in ethanol production. The purpose of this is to enrich farmers and channel money to corn producing states in order to secure votes. (It makes no kind of economic sense as a fuel source.) Now that the world faces more widespread famine (it’s already been a reality in many places for several years), it might make sense to shut down the ethanol plants for the time being, as this excerpt from an article today on WIRED (here) suggests (emphasis added):

“In the short run, USDA needs to figure out a way to remove the mandate on ethanol use from corn,” said Timmer [an agricultural economist]. “If we could free up 20 to 30 percent of the U.S. crop, reduced as it is, it would bring corn prices down very quickly.

New speculation limits are scheduled to be enacted by year’s end, but drought means that may be too late, said Bar-Yam [president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, a kind of scientific and technology think tank]. In the meantime, the USDA has rebuffed all requests to reduce corn biofuel allotments.

So it would make sense, but the USDA isn’t having any part of that. Well, duh because obviously farmers and ethanol barons are more important than 7 billion human beings and the reputation of the United States. Well, how is it going to fly when third world people are starving wholesale? They get to suffer and die horrible deaths while the U.S. in all the great wisdom of the USDA (headed by a rain-praying lawyer and professional politician) continues to turn huge amounts of corn into ethanol. Do we want to make America the Great Satan in fact as well as in name? If so, this will certainly do it. With hardly any effort at all we can make our country the most hated in the history of the world. When you open a future dictionary to the word “Evil” there will be a picture of Uncle Sam pointing at you. That’s what these idiots are doing.

Meanwhile, here’s a chart showing what happens when food prices rise. The numbers represent incidents of social unrest.

The Wired article suggests that “some think” food prices may have led to the so-called Arab Spring (it’s pretty plain that they did), and that therefore it was a “good thing.” Boy, if that’s good I’d hate to see what they consider bad. The idea that a bunch of raving lunatics taking over third world countries has something to do with “democracy” is totally nuts. It’s anarchy is what it is, followed by theocratic chaos, mayhem and murder. Somalia et al. are hardly models for Jeffersonian democracy. Incidentally, if you doubt the connection, note the number of incidents of food-related social unrest last year in the nations most affected by the Arab Spring: Tunisia 300+, Libya 10,000+, Egypt 800+, and now Syria 900+. Hmm, where there’s smoke and so forth.

One could assume that the 2008 and 2011 events (all centered on sharp rises in the UN’s FAO food index shown by the black dotted line) will be followed by similar events in spades when the presently developing food price spike gets its boots on (which is happening right now). Many of these represent small, insignificant countries (in Western eyes, at least although the indigenous peoples might beg to differ), but there are also some significant ones, including India with 1.5 billion mouths to feed. What happens if a major population subset such as India falls into out-and-out famine? India is presently suffering a reduced Monsoon so food shortages may be coming there soon, incidental to the crisis in world supplies which will severely limit or eliminate the possibility of filling production shortfalls with imports.

China doesn’t appear on the chart and I don’t understand why, because it also has been suffering something like 50,000 minor revolts and demonstrations each year, many of which must be food related. I guess it’s not on the list because the wise leaders of China say “nuh uh, it didn’t happen.” They must have legions of Winston Smiths busily rewriting history there in the Middle Kingdom. Northern China is also presently affected by drought. If India or China (or both) were to fall into widespread famine and anarchy It would be like Somalia X1000.

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Posted in Agriculture Issues, Climate Change, Economics, Ethical Issues, Famine, Global Security, Politics, Population Issues | Comments Off

Global ‘Food Wars’ Breaking Out

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

By David L. Brown

According to an article in the British newspaper The Guardian, a bidding war for a potash mining company reveals a looming problem: Finding the resources to feed a world on the brink of hunger

According to the article, which you can read here, the attempted takeover of Potash, Corp., the world’s largest source of potash, by mining giant BHP Billiton:

…lays bare the global struggle for resources on a planet struggling with water and food shortages, overpopulation and pollution. And it highlights a question that overshadows the 21st century: how to provide enough food for a global population that is set to rise from 6.8 billion to more than 9 billion by 2050, according to the United Nations.

The world is waking up to the coming era of food shortages, with governments and corporations scrambling to gain control of land, minerals, energy, and food markets. The flurry of activity is based on the further prediction by the UN that food production must be increased by 70 percent to meet the needs of the projected population of 2050.

Well, not to rain on anyone’s parade, but there are two comments I want to make.

First, it is troubling to witness global corporations lining up to make huge profits from this “opportunity”. It reminds me of war profiteering, “bad capitalism” run amok.

Second, I have to say that the chance of increasing the world’s food production by 70 percent is about as likely as a 400-lb. Hampshire sow sprouting wings and flying to the Moon. We are running out of resources folks, and our industrial agriculture is built on those very resources. Without increasing amounts of oil, gas, minerals such as potash, and fertile land itself, there is no way that we can increase production, and it would probably be a tremendous achievement even to keep it from peaking and beginning to drop.

Industrial agriculture depends upon increasing amounts of the resources it needs, and the outlook is for those resources to begin to decline just as world population continues to explode. Taking potash, the subject of this latest resource grab, as an example, here’s a graphic from Potash, Corp itself that plots demand, the gray bar, against the major world sources of the mineral.

potashdemand

If there was ever an example of demand running ahead of supply  this is it. Demand is already running far ahead of the supplyNote that from 2008 on world production remained virtually level. That is the indication of a peak, and resource peaks are generally followed by a decline. Meantime, demand will continue to rise. Through extraordinary action production might be able to temporarily get back ion an upward path—but that’s not the point. The question is how much potash do we need to increase food production by 70 percent and, even more important, where is it going to come from? And if population continues to go up, how can harvests keep up?

Many parts of the world are already lagging in food production for want of sufficient potash. For example, here’s an excerpt from The Guardian article about the situation faced by China and other over-populated nations:

Experts say crop yields are low in many regions, partly due to the historical under-application of fertiliser in many developing countries. China has 20% of the world’s population but just 6% of its arable land – which has dwindled as Chinese industry has ruined previously fertile tracts of ground through pollution and heavy industrialisation. The Fertiliser Institute in Washington says China and India use only half as much potash on their fields as American farmers.

Many of these “developing” countries have depended upon purchases of grain and other foodstuffs. As production begins to lag in North America and elsewhere, and with grain crops being diverted to the production of ethanol and biodiesel, those imports cannot be counted upon in the future. To vastly increase domestic production in places such as China would require immense quantities of resources—which are going to be available in declining quantities and at soaring prices. The result: a global outbreak of food wars, waged by the powerful and the desperate, in which resources will be sought at almost any cost. Those wars are already taking place, as this passage from The Guardian indicates:

In Africa, the Chinese are forging mining joint ventures and investments linked to China’s hunt for resources to fuel its fast-industrialising economy. Africa is also seeing a land grab that has been likened to Europe’s carve-up of the continent at the end of the 19th century. An Observer investigation earlier this year established that 50m hectares – more than double the size of the UK – had been acquired in the last few years by foreign governments and wealthy investors with state subsidies.

Ethiopia alone has approved 815 foreign-financed agricultural schemes since 2007. Saudi Arabia is thought to be the biggest buyer as it turns to Africa to meet domestic demand, a move that helps it to conserve water at home.

Charities have complained that foreign expansion has been at the expense of African smallholders and that overseas investment exacerbates hunger as land is increasingly turned over to growing crops for export. There have also been reports of evictions without compensation, bullying and rising crime.

Some of the African deals have been eye-wateringly large: China has signed a contract with the Democratic Republic of Congo to grow 2.8m hectares of palm oil for biofuels. Before it fell apart after riots, a proposed 1.2m-hectare deal between Madagascar and South Korea’s Daewoo would have included nearly half the country’s arable land.

The ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times,” comes to mind. Interesting, indeed, perhaps the most interesting ever. Watch this space.

Posted in Agriculture Issues, Essays and Opinion, Famine, Global Security, Population Issues | Comments Off

A World Teetering on the Brink of Instability

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

By David L. Brown

A news release from Earth Policy Institute this morning features a peek at the subject of global stability as reported in Lester Brown’s new book Plan B 4.0. This is a critical issue because nations that are failing create difficulty for any response to climate change and resource depletion.

I was intrigued by the list Brown presents, a ranking of the Top 20 failing states in the world as of 2008 (the 2009 list is out now, and is essentially unchanged). The table is from Foreign Policy magazine, based on statistics developed by the Fund for Peace in cooperation with the magazine. Together they each year measure the instability index of the world’s nations, that is, the chances they are failing or have already failed. These are the worst-cases:

top_20_failing_states

The rankings are based on 1-10 scores in 12 critical areas, with 10 being the worst. Thus, a completely failed state will score 120 points. (It’s hard to imagine such a place; it would probably consist of radioactive slag.) It’s no surprise to see that Somalia is No. 1 with 114.7 points. Zimbabwe is less than a point behind, followed by Sudan, Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It’s interesting to examine some of the other failed or failing states on this list. Extremely notable, to me at least, is that coming in Nos. 6 and 7 are nations familiar to most Americans … Iraq (108.6) and Afghanistan (108.2). These scores represent 90% of “perfect,” and yet we must scratch our head in puzzlement at the fact that our nation and many of its allies have spent the better part of a decade in the mission of creating successful democratic societies in those very places.

Now I am all in favor of peaceful democratic societies, but it’s generally been proven that nearly-failed states are not usually places where they are found. Does it make sense to attempt to plant the seeds of Western civilization in such infertile soil?

Iraq was formerly ruled by a ruthless dictator, “peace” being maintained under the iron-shod boot of tyranny. As Western troops depart, will that unhappy nation continue to move in the direction of “peaceful, Western-style democracy,” or will it break down into bloody rivalry between Shia, Sunni and Kurdish factions? As a very nearly failed state, the latter scenario seems a more likely outcome than the emergence of a Jeffersonian Golden Age.

And in Afghanistan, things are even worse. That benighted place has never really been a nation at all, but a ragtag collection of fiefdoms ruled over by warlords and funded by the opium trade. Even today, after years of military operations against them, the Taliban control wide areas of the region. Now that the U.S. has set its departure date for  2011, what hope is there for this failed state to suddenly thrive and grow into a peaceful member of the world’s democratic nations? To demonstrate my guess about the odds of that happening, try this experiment: Place one large snowball in a microwave oven; set the controls to “high” and the timer for ten minutes; and hit “cook”. Later as you mop up the floor, you’ll have a good analogy of what will likely be the future in Afghanistan, a place that has been impossible to rule since the days of Alexander the Great. Namely, a huge mess.

The place is absolutely unready to take responsibility for its own governance and security. The U.S. Marines have been assigned the task of training native Afghan soldiers, and according to a recent report from The Guardian, it’s a near fruitless exercise, dealing with illiterate, lazy, hash-smoking peasants who are completely ill-suited to function as modern-day soldiers.

So the outlook is dim for Afghanistan, No. 7 on the list  of Top 20 Failed States. But what can we learn from some of the others?

Well, there’s Pakistan right there at No. 10. The world’s sixth most populous nation, Pakistan is a nuclear power. How do you feel knowing that a nation that ranks 104.1 on an instability scale of 120 has nuclear bombs and missiles? Imagine how India feels, having to live right next door.

Pakistan isn’t the only unstable nation with a large population to make the list. Bangladesh, with a score of 98.1 is the seventh most populous nation, and right behind it is Nigeria, the eighth largest by population and a score of 99.8.

But that’s not all, for the Top 20 also includes North Korea, another nuclear power. Talk about instability!

Now, from the Fund for Peace website, here is a graphic to give you the “big picture” about world instability. You might be surprised and even dismayed, may even feel chills go up and down your spine. The nations colored in red are the most seriously failed or failing. There are presently 38 of them including Iran, another dangerous and potential nuclear power with a score of 90.0.

failedstatesYes, the red is where the most trouble is, but notice how much of the world is covered in orange, indicating a “warning” stage. And as far as those nations shown in green and judged “sustainable,” meaning safe, there are only 13 of them, not including the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Japan and many other advanced nations. As you can see, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, along with Ireland and five Scandinavian countries including Iceland are the main “safe” places, along with Switzerland, Holland, Austria and Luxembourg.

In case you’re wondering, here are the scores for some of the “yellow” countries: Germany 36.2; France 35.3; United States 34.0; United Kingdom 30.5; Japan 31.2. And the “safest” place of all: Norway 18.3.

It is interesting to note that the further you get from the “center” as indicated by this map, the safer. Central Africa, the Middle East and a few nations along the fringe  of Asia are worst off, surrounded by a sea of orange. It is only when you get far away from these areas that the colors fade to yellow, and finally to green.

And all of these nations, with perhaps only a rare exception or two, are presently meeting in Copenhagen to discuss a global plan to cooperate in mitigating CO2 emissions, no doubt the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. What could go wrong?

Posted in Conflict and War, Default File, Economics, Energy Technology, Essays and Opinion, Global Security, Politics, Population Issues | Comments Off

The World in 2100: A Choice of Futures

Friday, March 20th, 2009

By David L. Brown

Despite all the hullabaloo about global warming, the resulting climate change, and the impact on humanity, I continue to be amazed at the reluctance of those who discuss the subject to face up to the fact that Mother Nature is going to take care of the problem, perhaps quite soon.

A cover story in a recent issue of New Scientist included this image showing how the world might look in 2100 if the average temperature rises by 4º C.

26971701

Now this indicates that a pretty large section of the Earth is going to be quite a bit different from what we are used to. Yellow is desert and brown is uninhabitable. Now this is not going to be very scientific, because I am going to make a wild guess here. If you disagree, please insert the number you think is appropriate. My wild guess: This map indicates that the parts of the world where approximately 95 percent of human beings live is going to become either dry wasteland or totally unfit for human habitation.

So, how can we take this data point and create a conclusion? Well, first I will tell you what the New Scientist article more or less concluded. To wit, that an estimated nine billion people could be relocated to those areas in the far North and along the edge of Australia and a melting Antarctica. (In the interest of fairness, the writer did devote a scant two paragraphs to James Lovelock who opined that such an outcome was unlikely.)

And how is this miracle to be accomplished? Well, by allowing 20 square meters for each of the nine billion people, there will be plenty of space in Canada, Siberia, Northern Europe and so forth to house them. Of course, they will be a bit crowded, but nevermind, the author supposes that all those billions will be living in high rise buildings. Food would be produced by farming the former tundra land by some unexplained means.

Now, I don’t know about you but this sounds a little bit like a fantasy scenario. We will take all the people of the world, Arab camel drivers, Indian rag pickers, Pygmy hunger-gatherers, Wall Street bankers (oops, scratch that, they’ll soon be extinct), and transport them all up to Siberia or someplace in the Arctic region of Canada or Alaska, and put them all together in high rise buildings. All nine billion of them (and no doubt still continuing to breed toward the ten, eleven, twelve billion level)? Well, okay, now let me suggest that the comment she included for editorial balance from Lovelock makes a lot more sense. Here is what he said:

The only places we will be guaranteed enough water will be in the high latitudes. “Everything in that region will be growing like mad. That’s where all the life will be,” says former NASA scientist James Lovelock, who developed the “Gaia” theory, which describes the Earth as a self-regulating entity. “The rest of the world will be largely desert with a few oases.”
So if only a fraction of the planet will be habitable, how will our vast population survive? Some, like Lovelock, are less than optimistic. “Humans are in a pretty difficult position and I don’t think they are clever enough to handle what’s ahead. I think they’ll survive as a species all right, but the cull during this century is going to be huge,” he says. “The number remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less.”

Now here are the two scenarios: First, nine billion people living in high rise buildings while growing crops on former tundra while most of the world turns to scorching desert, or, second, a “cull” during this century that is going to be “huge.”

Well, I know which way I’m going to bet. Meanwhile, we see stories like this one from today;s news:

PRINCETON, NJ — For the first time in Gallup’s 25-year history of asking Americans about the trade-off between environmental protection and economic growth, a majority of Americans say economic growth should be given the priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent.

Now this may sound innocuous on the surface, but think about this: The pursuit of a go-go growth economic model is what has gotten us where we are today, faced with environmental disaster, peak-Everything, famine, economic collapse, and climate change that could make the map above come to be reality. And given the choice between helping stave off the terrible problems that face us, most people in the end vote for the status quo, or even worse, for an impossible return to a condition that is no longer possible.

How will those millions of high-rise buildings be built up there in the presently frigid North considering that we are running out of easily produced natural resources such as oil, iron, copper, and a host of other commodities? Will some Magic Fairy appear and wave a wand? This reminds me of my previous essays in which is invoked The Rabbit of Unreasonable Hope, ready to be pulled out of a magician’s hat to solve all the problems we face.

Unfortunately, there is no fairy, there is no rabbit, there are no easy answers. But that’s okay because even though the problems facing humanity are beyond our ability to solve, Mother Nature is standing by to take control of Her planet once again. She has done it before and she knows what to do. She uses proven tools such as the concept of “overshoot and collapse,” the application of famine, plague, war and death (the famous Four Horsemen). And she can always count on the foolishness of mere human beings to aid her at every step along the way.

Posted in Agriculture Issues, Climate Change, Desertification and Soil Loss, Population Issues | Comments Off

Mexican Border War Heating Up

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

By David L. Brown
One of the major problems facing the United States today is the fact that our First World nation is bordered by a Third World state, Mexico. The problem is magnified by the fact that Mexico is in the process of collapse, on the path to becoming a failed nation such as Zimbabwe or Somalia. The seriousness of this problem is hinted at by this excerpt from an Associated Press story today:

Feds Plan ‘Surge’ if Mexico Drug Violence Spills Into U.S.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

EL PASO, Texas  —  If Mexican drug violence spills across the U.S. border, Homeland Security officials say they have a contingency plan to assist border areas that includes bringing in the military.

“It’s a common sense extension of our continued work with our state, local, and tribal partners in securing the southwest border,” DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said Friday.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who described the contingency plan in an interview with The New York Times this week, said he ordered specific plans to be drawn up this summer as violence in Mexico continued to mount.

The plan includes federal homeland security agents helping local authorities and maybe even military assistance from the Department of Defense, possibly including aircraft, armored vehicles and special teams to go to areas overwhelmed with violence, authorities said.

Kudwa would not give specifics on the so-called “surge” plan, but said it does not create any new authorities.

In the last year, more than 5,000 people have been killed and police and military officials have become common targets for violent drug cartels who are fighting with each other and the government for control of lucrative drug and human smuggling routes across Mexico.

More than one-fifth of the deaths have occurred in Ciudad Juarez, the hardscrabble border city just across the Rio Grande from El Paso.

The ongoing drug wars just on our border are as bad as Afghanistan and Iraq, probably worse. A few weeks ago I saw a news item stating that for an entire 24 hour period there had been no murders in Tijuana. That was so unusual that it was considered to be news worthy of being reported in the U.S. press. At least, as this article indicates, our homeland security department is beginning to treat the problem with the seriousness it deserves.

There seems to be no end in sight and the problem just gets bigger. The Mexican government is corrupt to the core and completely unable to control its territory. I have news for the writer of that AP article, and that is that the Mexican war is already spilling over our borders. For example, there have been reports that growing numbers of Americans are being kidnapped here in our their own country and taken across the border to be offered for ransom. So far, the media and government have mostly downplayed cross-border crime such as this.

The more it is tolerated, the more it will be encouraged. That kind of criminal violence will continue to spread until we take strong action to secure the border and remove those Mexican criminal elements who are already here. The idea that it is politically incorrect to identify and deport illegal immigrants is national suicide.

We are witnessing a worldwide epidemic of collapsing civil law, a problem that will continue to spread, and a significant example is taking place right there on our very own southern border. Mexico is a failing state, just as surely as those in Africa. The northern tier of Mexican states from the Gulf to the Pacific is already in almost the same situation as Somalia, with drug lords and corrupt military and police engaged in civil and gang warfare, right on our own border.

The story calls this “drug violence.” That is over simplification. This is much more than that and as the world economy sinks, Mexico begins to suffer widespread famine, unemployment there becomes endemic, and the crime worsens, what will those tens of millions of starving and desperate people just to our south do then? Stay there and starve or be killed? Move to Zimbabwe? Ask their friends the Chinese to let them move there?

Um, no, as is traditional down there in Old Mexico they’ll be coming north to the Land of the Formerly Free and the Home of the No Longer Brave. To join the millions of their fellows who are already here. And we better start now if we want to prevent our nation being overrun by tens of millions of economic and environmental refugees.

Posted in Conflict and War, Global Security, Population Issues | Comments Off

A Realist Looks at the Year Ahead

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

By David L. Brown

Good morning everyone. If you woke up this morning (as I presume you did since you are reading this) you were probably surprised to learn that we have entered a New Year, Anno Domini 2009. I certainly was, but then these things have been sneaking up on me for a long time so I should have expected something like that.

Anyway, Happy New Year.

Now it’s time for the completely de rigueur Review of the Past Year, followed by Predictions of Things to Come.

First, let’s review a few highlights from Star Phoenix Base during the year just ended.

On January 2, 2008 in an essay titled “Looking Ahead to a Very Different Future,” I wrote: “Most predictions of the future rely on the old tried-and-true (and desperately false) technique of looking backward, then extending the trendlines of the past into the future. In some cases that has worked, but the technique has little chance of accurately predicting the future from our present position. The reason is that we are reaching the end of an era of rapid growth built on depletion of non-renewable resources.”

We wrote about ethanol and how turning food into fuel was a terrible mistake. We wrote about the climate change denial that has become even more strident in recent months. We noted the likely return of inflation and even its evil twin stagflation. And we hammered several times on the mistaken economic assumption that any commodity that is depleted will be replaced by something just as good.

In June I predicted a financial crisis that would probably lead to a new Great Depression. That may have seemed extreme back then, but how about today? Oh, wait, no problem, the government bailouts will surely prevent anything like that from happening. (Nevermind that investors have lost trillions of dollars and the world’s capital markets have declined by nearly 50 percent. That can’t be important, can it?)

In early July I predicted the impending demise of General Motors, writing: “the entire American auto industry seems to be in a downward spiral from which there may be no return. But it is almost inconceivable how fast the bad news has been coming.” Yeah, and it kept coming didn’t it?

In September I suggested that the financial crisis could be bad news for the “financial elite,” the ultra-rich. Didn’t seem likely those smart people would get caught off-base…until along came Bernie Madoff, the new Robin Hood who stole from the rich to give to…well, we aren’t sure where the money went.

Also in September I wrote about how “insourcing” was bringing manufacturing and jobs back to the U.S. More on that later.

In October I stated that “Much of today’s ‘money’ is a phantom, something that exists in computer networks and can flit around the globe at the press of a key. It is a fiction, a mere cloud of bits and bytes, and there is where the trouble starts.” We have seen that playing out at defunct or struggling financial institutions around the world. We have been living on the back of an imaginary economy where money isn’t real, but something based entirely on trust. There is an old saying of Ronald Reagan’s, originally used in the context of Soviet disarmament: “Trust, but verify.” Too many people trusted that their “money” actually existed, and too few verified. Again, Bernie Madoff is the poster child for what happened. One might expect that Bernie was not the only charlatan loose in the financial world and I expect that far more examples will emerge.

Also in October I wrote about the freeze of international trade due to the credit crunch. We don’t hear much about that, but it is a huge and growing problem. More on that below.

In November I shook off my previous mode of thinking, pessimism, and embraced realism. That was a liberating decision. You can read my thinking on this in the essay titled “Realism: The Emerging New World Order,” November 28, 2008. I concluded with this:

We see our once and future leaders acting as would-be saviors of the old world order advocating putting trillions of dollars into failed institutions in the apparent hope that if only those outdated corporations and other entities can be put back on their feet, things will return to “normal.” Well, here’s a hot tip: There is no more “normal” any more. “Normal” fell out of the nest some while back and was replaced by its evil twin, “Abnormal”. The idea that we can somehow transform the “abnormal” present back into the “normal” world we once knew is an impossible dream, a vain hope, and a disaster in the making. No, Humpty is well and truly broken and to spend trillions trying to glue and patch and stitch him back together is a foolish and pointless exercise in futility.

Notice that in my new “realism” mode I was not saying that everything was hopelessly screwed up, but only that mistakes were being made. That change would have to take place. That’s the realist’s view, to see things as they are and to reject wishful thinking.

So there’s some background on what was discussed here during the year just passed. What do I see in the year ahead? Well, I would surely like to put on a Pollyanna persona and tell you that all the dark clouds are going to blow away and the bright Sun shine through on a new day of happiness and prosperity for Humankind. I really wish I could, but as a realist I cannot because the facts dictate otherwise.

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Posted in Economics, Essays and Opinion, Politics, Population Issues, Resource Depletion | Comments Off

When Things Go Horribly, Terribly Wrong

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

As nay-sayers continue to deny that global warming is real, scientists now say that not only is it real, it’s probably too late to do anything about it. Here’s a rather lengthy excerpt from an article appearing today on the web site of The Guardian, a leading British newspaper:

At a high-level academic conference on global warming at Exeter University this summer, climate scientist Kevin Anderson stood before his expert audience and contemplated a strange feeling. He wanted to be wrong. Many of those in the room who knew what he was about to say felt the same. His conclusions had already caused a stir in scientific and political circles. Even committed green campaigners said the implications left them terrified.

Anderson, an expert at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University, was about to send the gloomiest dispatch yet from the frontline of the war against climate change.

Despite the political rhetoric, the scientific warnings, the media headlines and the corporate promises, he would say, carbon emissions were soaring way out of control – far above even the bleak scenarios considered by last year’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Stern review. The battle against dangerous climate change had been lost, and the world needed to prepare for things to get very, very bad.

“As an academic I wanted to be told that it was a very good piece of work and that the conclusions were sound,” Anderson said. “But as a human being I desperately wanted someone to point out a mistake, and to tell me we had got it completely wrong.”

Nobody did. The cream of the UK climate science community sat in stunned silence as Anderson pointed out that carbon emissions since 2000 have risen much faster than anyone thought possible, driven mainly by the coal-fuelled economic boom in the developing world. So much extra pollution is being pumped out, he said, that most of the climate targets debated by politicians and campaigners are fanciful at best, and “dangerously misguided” at worst.

What would it take to head off this scenario? Anderson says that “Only an unprecedented ‘planned economic recession’ might be enough.” He added: “The current financial woes would not come close.”

Ooops, a “planned economic recession.” That sounds like something that would be about as popular as a piranah in the punchbowl. Ain’t gonna happen. And, if my read on the depth and seriousness of our present “financial woes” are anywhere near right, the world economy is already facing unprecedented economic disaster—and yet Anderson says that wouldn’t even start to solve the problem.

The Guardian article continued:

Anderson is not the only expert to voice concerns that current targets are hopelessly optimistic. Many scientists, politicians and campaigners privately admit that 2C is a lost cause. Ask for projections around the dinner table after a few bottles of wine and more vote for 650ppm than 450ppm as the more likely outcome.

Bob Watson, chief scientist at the Environment Department and a former head of the IPCC, warned this year that the world needed to prepare for a 4C rise, which would wipe out hundreds of species, bring extreme food and water shortages in vulnerable countries and cause floods that would displace hundreds of millions of people. Warming would be much more severe towards the poles, which could accelerate melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.

Watson said: “We must alert everybody that at the moment we’re at the very top end of the worst case [emissions] scenario. I think we should be striving for 450 [ppm] but I think we should be prepared that 550 [ppm] is a more likely outcome.” Hitting the 450ppm target, he said, would be “unbelievably difficult”.

As we have been warning here, the problem of climate change is so serious that it could literally destroy civilization. Because of the possibility of sudden feedback and tipping point effects, the climate disaster could come quickly, far faster than humans could act in response. The only hope was (notice the past tense here) to take action in advance of the events. Unfortunately, we seem to be unwilling to do anything significant to avoid the climate crash, any more than the dinosaurs took heed of approaching asteroids. It’s business as usual with politicians, businessmen, and most everyone else on the planet.

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Posted in Climate Change, Melting Planet, Politics, Population Issues, Resource Depletion | Comments Off

Preparing for Triage in a Pandemic

Monday, May 5th, 2008

By David L. Brown

You are probably familiar with the term “triage,” a French word to describe the process of dividing battlefield casualties into three categories in order to apply medical services efficiently. Triage separates the wounded into those who are beyond help; those who do not need immediate attention; and those who do require immediate attention in order to survive.

We have written here before about the possibility of what might happen in case a pandemic of avian flu or some other virus should strike the world. Now it appears that the U.S. government is thinking about what kind of response might be required. The story appears on the FoxNews.com site today under the headline “Government Report Answers Who Lives, Who Dies in Flu Pandemic.”

According to the article, a panel of medical experts convened as a task force has outlined a kind of triage process to determine who should receive hospital help and who should not in case of a pandemic. To summarize, those who are to be denied medical care during a pandemic include: People over 85 years old; those with severe injuries; severely burned patients older than 60; those with severe mental impairment such as advanced Alzheimer’s, and those with serious chronic diseases such as “advanced heart failure, lung disease or poorly controlled diabetes.”

The Fox report asks the question: “Should doctors be allowed to play God?” Well, I have news for them, and that is that doctors are always in the position of having to make life or death decisions when choices must be made. They are not “playing” at anything, but generally just trying to do the best job they can in difficult circumstances.

Here is more from the FoxNews.com report:

The proposed guidelines are designed to be a blueprint for hospitals “so that everybody will be thinking in the same way” when pandemic flu or another widespread health care disaster hits, said Dr. Asha Devereaux. She is a critical care specialist in San Diego and lead writer of the task force report.
The idea is to try to make sure that scarce resources — including ventilators, medicine and doctors and nurses — are used in a uniform, objective way, task force members said.

Their recommendations appear in a report appearing Monday in the May edition of Chest, the medical journal of the American College of Chest Physicians.

“If a mass casualty critical care event were to occur tomorrow, many people with clinical conditions that are survivable under usual health care system conditions may have to forgo life-sustaining interventions owing to deficiencies in supply or staffing,” the report states.

Now for a bit of cynical commentary. The vision of what a true pandemic would be like in today’s world, and the manageable situation that seems to be envisioned by this panel of experts, are quite a bit apart. The report makes the whole thing seem like a minor outbreak of disease, what is called an epidemic. And of course, a flu epidemic would be a serious thing indeed.

But what we are talking about here is not an epidemic at all, but a pandemic, and that is quite a different thing. The medical dictionary on MedicineNet.com defines it this way:

Pandemic: An epidemic (a sudden outbreak) that becomes very widespread and affects a whole region, a continent, or the world.

By contrast: An epidemic affects more than the expected number of cases of disease occurring in a community or region during a given period of time. A sudden severe outbreak within a region or a group as, for example, AIDS in Africa or AIDS in intravenous drug users.

So a pandemic is a sort of mega-epidemic, and if one were to occur here in the U.S. I suggest that the medical community would be completely unable to deal with it. Even now, hospitals have only about as many beds as they can keep filled under normal circumstances. Due to economic factors staffing in most hospitals has been cut to the bone in most facilities.

The last serious pandemic was that of the so-called Spanish Flu, in 1918-20. It is estimated that 2.5 to 5 percent of all human beings on Earth died from this scourge, perhaps as many as 100 million. In the U.S. alone, about 28% of the population were infected by the virus and 500,000 to 675,000 died.

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Posted in Disease and Pandemics, Population Issues | 1 Comment »

The Future is Now for Haiti

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

by Val Germann

An article today on the Inter Press website highlights the rapidly deteriorating conditions in Haiti, the world’s poster child for overpopulation, bad government and poor living conditions. Let us take a brief look at what it’s like to live in a county with no visible means of support even as its population continues to nearly double every generation:

A green, red and yellow-striped umbrella is all that keeps Hernite Joseph from the searing sun as she takes apart a frozen chicken with a screwdriver and places the small pieces into neat piles stacked three high.

“A long time ago, when things were good, I’d go to work and had enough food to feed my two youngest kids,” said Joseph, who sells chicken parts imported from the United States.

But recently, rising food prices have made it nearly impossible for Joseph to feed her children.

“My kids are like toothpicks,” said Joseph, sitting at a cardboard-covered wooden table in La Saline market, one of the capital’s largest. “They’re not getting enough nourishment.”

. . .

For her and her three children, the future is up in the air and if the cost of living continues to rise, Henrite only sees one outcome: “I will die.”

It’s difficult for this U.S. Midwesterner, living right in the middle of the world’s most productive agricultural region, to understand the devastation and despair that’s gripping Haiti these days. The place is a ruin, two-thirds of its “labor force” without any occupation at all and its local food production down to less than 50-percent of what it was, in absolute terms, 25 years ago.

The latest result of all this: food riots that brought down the government last Sunday. But that’s hardly any real help since the “new government” has only one genius idea in its brainiac hopper: a cut of 16-percent in the price of rice to poor Haitians, in the face of a doubling of rice prices over the last several months. Somehow that does not seem like enough.

What is “the world” going to do about this, and about similiar situations breaking out all over the place, from North Korea to the Phillippines and from Africa to the Caribbean? The U.S. administration has announced an increase in its “food aid” but in reality it’s only a drop in the bucket compared to what’s actually needed, and that’s just for today. What about tomorrow?

I think that lady at the top of this article has her mind around the situation properly and understands perfectly what is coming down the road. That is, if things don’t change soon then she will die. Exactly.

Posted in Agriculture Issues, Conflict and War, Population Issues | 1 Comment »

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