America's Fateful Choice

As we approach the climax of the USA's fourth turning, a national consensus is brewing on the nature of our crisis and the way to overcome it. It hardly appears that renewed warning cries from concerned scientists are what we are preparing to rally around. Americans are loath to allow global concerns to trump our privileged status. On the other hand, threats to our great nation could lead us to intervene globally, saying with Lucifer, 'Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Paradise.' Only one problem with that: Lucifer is immortal. Mankind is not.

Hell could overwhelm Earth regardless of who reigns if humanity does not rally in the next few years to reclaim what we can of this lost Paradise. Then, what will it matter whether Putin, Xi, or Trump wore the one ring to rule them all? It is not just a matter of quality of life, it is a matter of life and death - for everyone.

A war between great powers, while culling masses from our overpopulated planet, will only delay action and waste resources needed to resolve the ecological crisis. If the war goes nuclear, it would doom untold millions even more quickly by accelerating the collapse of earth systems.

By James Vaughn

As Old Blowhard acts out his China policy, we will soon have a better idea of the USA's propensity to ignite the nuclear fuse. A war between the U.S. and Russia is now doubtful, but, unless the Un-President's Asia trip marks a real change of tone toward our next near-peer competitor, doomsday could be in the offing.  Let's hope that Xi realizes that the Fatty Trumpling is just a blowhard and also, that said blowhard would find a Gameboy should he ever pop open the nuclear 'football.' If his future actions vis-a-vis China comport with the airs he displayed while visiting, then we should be relieved. The strategic situation calls for retreat, not saber rattling.

When the two possible alternatives are permanent human extinction or a temporary era of difficulty, eliminating the first choice should be a no brainer. Are we such misanthropes that we would risk the lives of billions of humans just for a chance at greater personal freedom? Better for a nation to endure, for a spell, even the indignity of subjugation, than to endanger the whole world with annihilation. In the culmination of our secular crisis, whatever beligerence Old Blowhard engenders with China, let our singular consensus be to reject fratricidal war and, instead, turn as a nation to the intergenerational project of saving the planet.

America's Weak Immune System

While weighing the possibilities of launching more Tomahawks on parts uncivilized, Blowhard has paid scant attention to a threat far more perilous than chemical weapons; even far more likely than a nuclear attack, but more deadly. That threat is from viruses in our environment that can mutate, spread, and multiply too quickly for us to respond if we are not organized and prepared. Once a virus is on a rampage, the result of unpreparedness could be millions of deaths in just a few weeks... for months on end.

Those viruses may seem to favor squalid and exotic places, but globalization, decay of our cities and towns, and wild changes in our climate make the U.S. a better breeding ground than we would care to admit. Neglect of the environment only increases the chances of a pandemic. Blowhard is not only guilty of such neglect, he is also failing to appoint officials who can prepare us for any outbreaks that do occur - indeed, he is calling for drastic budget cuts to agencies whose job it is to head off pandemics. Then again, this is a president who thinks that any domestic problem can be solved with a travel ban.

From Esporo

The world's most recent brush with widespread pestilence was the West African Ebola hemorrhagic fever outbreak in 2014. Blowhard was calling for travel bans - in this case, aimed at the medical heroes coming home from the front lines of the fight against Ebola. Any new viral threat would surely elicit executive orders for travel bans. Given Blowhard's craven germophobia, how many responders today would catch a one-way flight to head off that threat? Then, when the disease lands in the U.S. anyway, how many Blowharders would refuse to get their children vaccinated for fear of making them autistic?

America's retrenchment from globalism, while due, will have many drawbacks that leave us less capable of mustering global responses to problems such as pandemics, climate change, and feeding the hungry. There are several indicators that we won't be ready to respond effectively when the next virus outbreak occurs. This aspect of the America First doctrine may be tantamount to genocide by negligence.

Read “Weevil Bride” by Rishloo on Genius

The Chesapeake Bay in Greater Peril Than Ever

While the estuary on a stick known as Maryland girds for legal battles over continuing the federal program to restore the Chesapeake Bay, the global force of climate change will increasingly hamper the region-wide effort even if the program ends up being fully funded in the official federal budget.

We are already able to discern the impacts of climate change on the Chesapeake. For example, though most of the world is losing access to water, the northern Chesapeake Bay area where I live has gained 6.6 inches of annual precipitation over the last century. In some respects, this is beneficial, but the major negative effect of more heavy rain is runoff into the bay and its tributaries, causing pollution by nutrients and sediment. This is exacerbated by urbanization throughout much of the watershed. Building codes and local governments are racing to keep up with the problem of stormwater runoff caused by development.

Rising temperatures affects a number of other aspects of the bay ecosystem. One is the profusion of Vibrio bacteria which spreads cholera and a similar disease either by ingestion or through skin lesions.

Before President Blowhard dispenses with climate change throughout the executive branch, government-funded scientists are valiantly assembling reports explaining its observable and anticipated effects. With the amount of rainfall increase we have observed with just a 1.5 C temperature increase, it seems that we should expect significantly more in the coming decades if global temperatures continue to go up exponentially.

From Albert Bates at The Great Change

The graph here shows a generic temperature curve along with several global macronomic indicators modeled in the Limits to Growth study. You might note that the human population is expected to drop in about thirty years (as food becomes too scarce) and think that this will flatten the temperature curve, but there is a delay between cause and effect in global warming as vertically circulating ocean currents cycle over a millennium meaning that increases in ocean temperatures and release of dissolved CO₂ will not achieve their full effect on the atmosphere until decades after the greenhouse effect is arrested by lowering atmospheric carbon.

Bottom line: we can't restore the bay by taking our current inadequate measures. Rising atmospheric temperatures make it necessary to exercise even more severe measures to avoid pushing the bay beyond recoverable limits.  We should not only continue to limit runoff from new and existing development, but we also need to rethink urbanization in terms of permaculture and apply afforestation wherever we can.

New Worlds Coming?

By Kaigani Turner

Besides the return to industrialism (and later, agrarianism), another resemblance the U.S. has to Russia is our continuation of costly space programs. Spin-offs of these efforts do compensate at least partially for our investment, but space programs that support continuation of globalism (for example) may not pay off very well as trade dwindles due to diminishing resources. Another longshot, or rather, moonshot, is the proposal to NASA by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin to set up infrastructure on and around the moon that will be the beginnings of an effort to support "millions of people living and working in space."

That sounds like it could become a bit expensive, even if undertaken by fanatically dedicated engineers. I can't help but wonder if the urge to populate space stems from a Plan B choice regarding the carrying capacity of Plan A (Earth). If that is the motivation, then it seems to me that we could get along fine without Plan B if nations would be willing to live in communion with nature rather than always seek to dominate it (though the population explosion does make that option quite difficult, as well).

Yet, the challenge of space exploitation might substitute nicely for the youthful urge to develop and operate weapons to combat enemies on the far side of the globe. The competitive aspect is still there - among companies, and with other countries (China, Russia). Another competitor is NASA, but our pro-capitalist government will almost certainly cede our Space efforts to private enterprise; leaving just two major competitors domestically - Blue Origin and SpaceX. To maintain token competition in our space industrial base, one company will probably get the lead on moonshots and the other on a new constellation of Internet satellites. That venture, too, is fraught with risk.

With Stephen Bannon's advocacy, these types of space missions will probably be pursued under Trump. In a past life, Bannon headed the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona which demonstrated how a small group could be sustained in a created ecological environment without external provisions. More development of this type of system would lead to deploying them in space. More recently, at Breitbart News, Bannon's momentarily famous underling, Milo Yiannopoulos, put out a call for an audacious space program.

Too bad all that additional budget proposed for defense wasn't put into the NASA line instead. Along with diverting money from warfighting, it could save the Earth Science Division. How about it Congress? Or are we just going with Plan B?

No Peaking

The human world's consumption of energy and consequent production of waste heat shown on the graph here reminds me of the microbial activity observed in my compost piles by way of temperature readings. The scale would need adjusting to read in degrees Fahrenheit, but the initial climb and plateau are quite similar. The second heating phase (China joining the world economy) would be analogous to adding another huge batch of well-chopped organic matter to the pile; it brings the temperature even higher, but the effect is relatively short-lived. Once the temperature of the pile peaks at about 160 degrees, the microbial population can no longer tolerate those conditions and there is a rapid die-off causing the temperature to drop to near ambient.

Without resorting to manurial metaphor, Gail Tverberg explains how the current downturn in per capita energy consumption could well continue into a complete collapse of our current way of life. Rather than ascribing the cause to peak oil, as it is usually construed, she explains how demand destruction aggravated by enormous debt could, ultimately, be what drives our economy into ruins.

Industry hacks make lipstick out of oil and put it on the pig of energy production. Mentioning "peak oil" in conversation conjures up the idea of oil shortages, when, in fact, there is no apparent shortage presently. Though the energy quandary the world faces presently was ushered in by peak oil and peak coal, it may be better to side step the cognitive dissonance and characterize the issue as a population problem. Talking in terms of "population overshoot" or "carrying capacity" encompasses all resources, not just energy. It also brings in the even more daunting notion of the developing latest extinction of the biosphere.

Upon hearing the vision statement of a big ag oriented talk on the state of agribusiness in Maryland, I raised the question of whether the authors' views of a foreseeable future took into account peak oil. The answer was no, which led me to take many of the conclusions presented with a grain of salt. Later, in a different context, I brought up the importance of preserving biodiversity in Calvert County, which raised more discussion, but my earlier peak oil concern never got much air time. 

Raising the carrying capacity flag, rather than the peak oil flag, implicitly postulates a global context. The term is more immune to dismissal by our inured belief that substitutes can be found for everything, because it implies that limits exist. Peak oil is usually discounted by the idea that additional peaks in newly exploited resources will come along, as needed, to endlessly boost total energy production. However, pointing out that we need to withdraw our footprint from half of the earth's surface if mankind is to have a chance at a secure future brings the scope of the problem into clearer focus and sets the context to address planning in the light of population overshoot and carrying capacity. 

Jumping down from a global scale, solutions can be cast in a local frame since ecosystems function globally, continentally, regionally, locally, and microscopically . Hence, in the discussion of the future of agriculture in Maryland, a renewed program to preserve and restore wilderness in our county makes sense, though it would likely reduce land available for agriculture. This would push us to more intensive and careful stewardship of land resources, whereas peak oil, of necessity, pushes us toward smaller, more localized agricultural enterprises. Either way, we end up with a vision far different than the one proffered by big ag advocates.