Climate Change: How Governments Will Respond – Mid-Missouri John Brown Gun Club

The whole reason I’m writing essays on this website now is because in 2004, I stumbled upon the following article on the internet:

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us by Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in New York (The Guardian)

Once I’d read it, I realized that the Powers That Be (PTB) had decided not to address climate change. My logic was basically: If the military is telling the PTB that this problem will destroy us all, but they’re still not doing anything substantive about it, then it isn’t about people not believing environmentalists; rather, the default plan is collapse. In a panic, I made a long list of things I had to do in the next 45 years or so, and I started with the thing that seemed the hardest: Acquiring and learning how to use firearms. As a result, when the Mid-Missouri John Brown Gun Club was first getting started in 2017, they invited me to join.

It isn’t just George W. Bush and the Republican Party that have decided to collapse, but the (near right) Democratic Party as well. The Democrats are still flying the flag of (Bill) Clintonism, a slightly less right-wing response to Reaganism that the DNC believes is necessary to win elections. The entire US political apparatus (including the elites that rule it) has decided to collapse. Because the US is the dominant player in global capitalism, this plan is the whole world’s plan. You can literally learn the details of the plan by reading about the latest meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Is that an oversimplification? Yes. Are there some parts of the Powers That Be (PTB) that truly don’t understand climate change? Probably, but based on what I’ve read about Davos, it seems likely that they are a small minority.

Possible Government Responses are Limited

We reached the carrying capacity of the Earth in 1970 at around 3.6 billion people. We’ve been able to extend the carrying capacity of the Earth to 8 billion (or more) by using fossil fuels to mechanize farming, to ship food all over the world, and to create fertilizers and poisons that increase crop yields; in the process, we have effectively reduced the carrying capacity of the Earth to around 2 billion people (though that’s a guess) by poisoning the land, sea and air, with the air being the most salient issue because all that extra carbon in the atmosphere causes climate change. The PTB has put off meaningful mitigation of climate change for so long, that now only extreme mitigations will have a significant effect.

What responses from the PTB (and thus governments) are possible?

The PTB could decide to immediately stop using fossil fuels, full stop. This would keep climate change to 2C, but because the natural carrying capacity of the Earth is now 2 billion, there would be at least 6 billion dead people in a week. Yes, there would also be worldwide riots of a scale never before seen by humanity, and people would just stop obeying the PTB and they would lose power, having been replaced by a combination of fascist and socialist governments. As a result, this isn’t really an option.
The PTB could decide to immediately stop using fossil fuels for everything except food. No immediate die-off with this scenario; however, there would still be rioting in the wealthier parts of the world (COVID illustrated that even the smallest amount of deprivation will cause people to completely freak out), and the PTB would again lose power. This isn’t really an option from their perspective, either.
The PTB can engage in a meaningless dialogue about climate change (electric cars, Mars, greening the grid) that is mostly just a distraction while they invest in strategies for weathering (pun intended) climate change as it cuts the human population down to something below 1 billion. (So far, green capitalism hasn’t reduced carbon in the atmosphere at all — it continues to increase.) The most likely outcome is that every last human dies, but keep in mind that the PTB are narcissists, and narcissists have a stubborn optimism about their chances of success. Also keep in mind that the PTB only really cares about perhaps 10,000 people (400 families and a few servants, security forces, robotics technicians, and such) at the most, which is technically enough to maintain the human species.

So, let’s acknowledge 4 things about this:

The options available to the PTB are extremely limited, and always have been — but they themselves imposed those limits.
The PTB have decided that their social status and power are more important than the lives of nearly 8 billion people; i.e., this is an intentional genocide.
They are not just going to genocide the poor. They are not just going to genocide marginalized groups. They aren’t just going to genocide people in “shit-hole countries”. Unless you are very close friends with those 400 families that run the world, they are going to genocide you and your children.
Because run-of-the-mill fascists are enthusiastic about genocide, those fascists are going to be fine with the genocide (even helping it along!) until it affects them personally, at which point it will be too late.

Won’t this destroy capitalism?

Yes! Capitalism is wounded and dying. Remember that capitalism isn’t the “final boss” so to speak. Capitalism is a thin veneer concealing, justifying and facilitating the true hierarchy, which is based entirely on narcissism; you can see that this is true every time a government or organization makes a decision that doesn’t make financial sense. Maximizing profits isn’t as important as maintaining the power and status of the PTB, and when the system can’t do both, it is the power and status of the PTB that is served.

The default plan — genocide of everyone who isn’t the PTB — will necessarily end capitalism. The PTB will likely instead develop a sort of socialist system among themselves, with a relatively small enslaved class and a whole lot of automation, and will control resources and capital directly with violence. There might not be an intermediary layer of “money” for the PTB; instead, there will be direct trades of resources and products between territories/families, though the enslaved class is likely to continue being forced to deal with some kind of money because it makes a great justification for abuse and neglect (as we’ve already seen). It is likely that “ownership” will be expressed as territories and responsibilities that belong to particular families; the enslaved class will own nothing. It will look a lot like feudalism. Imagine the novel “Dune” but confined to a single planet, with dramatically fewer people, no space travel, and slavery. Will these neofeudal families be able to resist the temptation to fight amongst themselves? Probably not, but it’s hard to say.

That is the long term (post-2050) outlook, though.

What about the short term?

In the pre-2050 timeframe, government responses to climate-change-induced collapse will be essentially the same as today:

Climate change policy will continue to limp along at a pace that is insignificant in relation to the scale of the problem, including backing and promotion of technological solutions that are too little, too late. This is climate change policy as distraction so you don’t see that the genocidal default plan is still in effect.
Practical strategies to work against climate change will continue to be privatized but publicly funded, which puts more money in the pockets of the PTB. These strategies will never result in a net reduction in atmospheric carbon.
Geo-engineering to compensate for climate change will happen.
Political parties will engage in performative debate about immigration policy, yet all parties will continue to support basically the same immigration policies, and borders will be strengthened as the number of immigrants heading north continues to increase.
The parts of the collapse that you might call “economic” will continue to ebb and flow with a general downward direction. Politicians will claim that they have the solution, but they do not. The extremely rich will continue gaining wealth as the rest of us continue to become poorer; this is intentional.
Fascists will continue the rotating list of who they want to genocide and will get more aggressive about it. Governments will continue to respond inadequately as long as fascists remain the lesser threat to the PTB relative to the left.
If the neoliberal faction (i.e., the Democratic Party) is able to gain enough power, they may decide to go to war against the fascists, but it seems more likely that they’ll continue this political stalemate that keeps the left under control. The PTB will continue to see the left as a bigger threat than fascist populism because it is (based on their criteria).
As always, there will be regional military conflicts. They’ll tend to be more pointedly about resources as time goes on.
During downturns, there will be shortages. During upturns, not everything that was in short supply before will be restored. That will start with certain flavors of Oreos or certain types of vehicles not coming back, but eventually it will be whole classes of things that won’t come back; e.g., coffee, cinnamon, bananas, computers, cars.

I could keep going, but the point should be clear: More of the same, but just a little bit worse every day.

What will be the exact date of collapse?

Yeah, yeah. OK, newb. Here’s the deal: There will be no specific date of collapse. A specific geographic area will have a “collapse” but then recover, only to collapse again (and more) later. No one will even have an accurate list of which cities and counties are currently more or less “collapsed”. People will debate what “collapsed” even means. Moreover, collapse doesn’t mean that everything goes all “Lord of the Flies” immediately, and mostly, a period of collapse will just be horribly boring. We are already doing “collapse”; the collapse is here now. This is it. People may wander aimlessly and kill each other, but not like a zombie horde; again, imagine it being as boring as possible and you’ll be close to what this will be like. Hollywood has you thinking that a collapse is something that happens over maybe 3 days of exciting violence or a perhaps a month at most; the world is both more complicated and more resilient than that. The Roman empire took two-and-a-half centuries to collapse.

However, I can also tell you that nothing has changed since Limits to Growth was released in 1972, their model continues to match reality, and so it seems like the collapse will be complete by 2050 (meaning that any organized societies that exist after that will be qualitatively different from what we have now). Things should get noticeably worse than they are now (again, we’re already collapsing) over time, with 2033 being qualitatively worse than now, which is qualitatively worse than 2013 was.

Wait a sec! I thought we still had more time!

Nope, it is now too late. Collapse is now inevitable. The question now is how many people are going to die in the course of that collapse and after, and as I’ve pointed out, the PTB are still on the default plan which is most likely to result in every human being dying, but could potentially save a small number that will not include you. To change this, you would have to overthrow the PTB and choose a life of relative deprivation…and you’d have to get everyone else to go along with it. How likely is that?

What people like Greta Thunberg or Roger Hallam (the Extinction Rebellion guy) are fighting for now isn’t to prevent climate change but rather to minimize and mitigate it and distribute the misery of climate change to wealthier people than what the default plan would choose. Their best case scenario — which is extremely unlikely — would still likely result in the human population dropping to 4 billion, though most of that would be people choosing not to have children.

Are you some kind of Malthusian bad person?

There’s an Atlantic article out today that I can’t read because of the paywall, but in part it says:

In recent years, many climate advocates have emphasized human population itself—as opposed to related factors such as consumption and technology—as the driving force behind environmental destruction. This is, at bottom, a very old idea that can be traced back to the 18th-century cleric Thomas Malthus. It is also analytically unsound and morally objectionable. Critics of overpopulation down through the ages have had a nasty habit of treating people less as individuals with value and agency than as sentient locusts.

It is true that this collapse is going to fuel a huge amount of fascist justification of genocide, and it is also true that the people they choose to kill will often be the least guilty of causing the problem because they will be people whose consumption and use of technology has the least environmental impact. I hope I’ve been clear about the fact that the default plan is an intentional genocide and it is wrong. I think I’ve been clear about what is required to get off of the default plan — as clear as the PTB allow, anyway.

It’s also clear that the more the left talks about social justice in relation to climate change, the more both Democrats and Republicans will push back against doing anything about it at all, with the Democrats encouraging the left to calm down, and the Republicans getting violently excited about how the communists are coming for them. My opinion is that we should go ahead and talk about it because at least we will have the moral high ground, though we won’t end up with much else.

While consumption is certainly an important part of the math of overshoot, the people who refuse to talk about population also refuse to meaningfully limit consumption. Instead, they pretend that a magical technological advancement will solve the problem; it will not. If we combine the two issues, the answer is not to visit the suffering and death of climate change on the poorest countries and individuals, but rather on the richest; doing so would allow far more people to survive.

xtinction Rebellion Founder Speaks Out (Aaron Bastani interviews and annoys Roger Hallam)