I’m not the author though I came to the same conclusions as him after years of reading climate publications (I might not be as absolute in terms of timeline, mind you).
He has also posted this follow-up article.
This reminds me of the “Anarchist” (scare quotes) publication “Desert”. It has the same outlook and prescription. Give up.
The socio-political facts are: hyperfragile modern civilization will collapse following agricultural failure. We’re not going to geoengineer our way out of this. There will not be a revolution. Fascism is ascendant and governments will protect billionaires and sacrifice the working class.
This is the issue with doomerism. It’s comfortable. It’s certain. And it doesn’t ask anything of you but to prepare and wait for the end.
This kind of rhetoric is very similar to certain kinds of counterrevolutionary state agitation within revolutionary groups. It has the same result: checked-out people incapable of fighting for their liberation. I definitely don’t blame anyone personally for developing this kind of world outlook but collectively we should be very suspicious and critical of these kind of ideas.
The author’s argument against “net zero” and other climate change mitigation is highly reliant on a few people’s testimony that certain conventional ideas of how this may be achieved are impossible. Then they go on to claim the entire endeavor is impossible. This is a very premature conclusion to draw. The world is, unfortunately, still in a very naive and early stage of dealing with this extinction-level catastrophe. As this gets worse, even the ruling class will be forced to confront that market-based approaches will not work and something much more comprehensive and coordinated will have to be tried. Giving up based on the shortcomings of the narrow solutions presented in this article would be very counterproductive. There’s a book along these ideas called “Climate Leviathan” that you may want to check out if you’re interested.
It can’t be denied that things are looking very bad. But the future is not yet determined. There are positive developments on some fronts: increasing world “multi-polarity”, the slipping grip of the world hegemon on the third world, a revival of the labor movement in the first world, etc. On the whole, things are probably going to get worse. But this same likelihood also means more opportunities for revolutionaries. As capitalism becomes more and more incapable of dealing with climate change, the destruction of the imperialist world order, all the other problems which plague the world today; the easier it will be to defeat.
Idk who will read this and I know I’m in /c/doomer but… please don’t give up.
I disagree, especially based on my reading, and especially for your comment about the part where suggested solutions are rejected only based on single testimonies; it’s the reverse to be honest, we’re talking about essential technologies to avoid a high likelihood of human extinction being considered as available or soon-to-be-available in IPCC projections when they haven’t even been experimented on at scale (after political, not scientific, editing, I might add - we had a leak of the pre-politically-edited IPCC report a few months back and it was much clearer about the risk of extinction) - and the smaller scale examples of BeCCS that have been tried, for example, reek with issues. This fight is against the law of thermodynamics. We’ve released tens of million of years of bio-accumulated solar energy in the span of a century. Even assuming nuclear fusion was practically suddenly available tomorrow would those routes seem extremely doubtful according to the IPCC scenarios in terms of time available, due to the infrastructure/deployment requirements. And this is time we already burnt. And we do not have energy-harvestable nuclear fusion right now (we could have, though, had we actually spent resources seriously on it 40 years ago; perhaps if the USSR had not died).
Ultimately though I think your comment has a better outlook than mine, and is definitely a positive thing, thank you. Nothing is ever hopeless. We live in a wonderful chaotic universe and there may be a black swan event. Even if not, there is still (limited IMO) hope that personally I cling to for some sort of global collapse without extinction followed by an awesome communist society to come centuries from now, having learnt The Lesson. I might add the author himself said they planned to post a “what to do” further article; ultimately the aim is not hopelessness, but realization of just how much more direr than usually described the situation actually is.
Well I probably won’t read all 78 hours of the article, but thanks.
Coolhot graphs
It’s indeed pretty long; there’s an audio version at the top you can listen in as an alternative
Mind you it’s real doomer content; not reading it all in one go might actually be a good idea
