NickBlack.com

For the last couple of years, while I’ve been spending time on the ocean whenever possible, there’s really been little to say. Much as expected the financial system has imploded and now the people of Europe and the US (at least) are essentially bankrupt, while a number of bankers are incredibly rich. Despite various politicians and banking professionals on both sides of the Atlantic professing astonishment at how such a thing could happen, it was in fact predictable. Soros, Taleb, and a host of others warned for years that the system was a keg of dynamite. It is very difficult to see a way for the economies of the west to recover on a comfortable timeframe. Unfortunately this comes at a time when what we needed in the world was a financial system that would allow us to make the best possible investments in climate remediation efforts and energy infrastructure alternatives to oil and gas. That money has now evaporated or has been spent on private luxury.
On the ecology/climate front I have seen nothing to make me change my initial assessment that we are now past the point of being able to control the speed of ecological collapse in various critical environments and stop the global temperature increasing beyond anything our species has experienced. On the contrary, the acceleration of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere continues unabated despite the endless round of meetings and treaties. The reason is not hard to see: for politicians it is simply impossible to make the kinds of commitments necessary and stay in office. We are now at 385ppm, and increasing by about 2 ppm per year. So it is inevitable that we will pass 400ppm, at which point our climate will begin to resemble the Miocene, the last time levels were this high. Temperatures were 3∞ to 6∞ C higher and sea level was 24-40m higher.
Worse, it appears from some recent articles that fewer, rather than more, people in the US and Europe believe in anthropogenic climate change. Which means that even if there are some measures we can take it will be very hard to get anything through democratic governments. We are left with trying to come to terms with how to manage in an increasingly chaotic environment with things as they stand. While we haven’t much experience dealing with this level of disruption, there are examples of cultures and societies in the past confronting ecological, financial and population challenges. We don’t have a great record. From the collapse of the Akkadian Empire in 2200 BC, civilization has been repeatedly overwhelmed by natural disasters, overpopulation and financial ruin – rare high impact events to which complex societies are unable to adapt. Despite our technological prowess we are in no better position to deal with such events than Sargon’s subjects. They had, however, a minimal advantage: there was somewhere else to go. We have a global civilization and there’s nowhere else to go.
The traditional response to collapse has been migration on a mass scale by the survivors. There’s nothing in the current circumstances to suggest that the same thing is not happening now. Even the IPCC, which is generally on the conservative side of things, never mind the Pentagon, sees the burgeoning levels of migration from what we used to laughingly call the ‘developing world’ as a major security issue and those nations at the receiving end will increasingly respond militarily. I’m wondering what kind of government changes that requires. Clearly the current liberal governments of the West don’t seem to be advocating such measures, but I’m beginning to wonder how far down the road (think Cormac McCarthy) we go before increasingly frightened populations demand military response. What kind of government does that call for? At what point are people scared enough of the influx to want what is essentially a military government? What does that look like and how would it happen?