Repurposed Prose on the End of Times

The end-times are truly upon us!. Paul Kedrosky writes some Repurposed Prose on the End of Times

With respect to some of the more apocalyptic views out there, certainly anything is possible. That said, organizing my life around a return to barter and barbarism represents a financial variant of Pascal’s wager that I'm not currently willing to take -- in part because I can be financially and personally prudent without going all the way to hoarding gold, buying agricultural property, or stocking up on weaponry and canned goods.

Kedrosky had earlier quoted Niall Ferguson: "There Will Be Blood" in an interview with Heather Scoffield of Globe and Mail:

Heather Scoffield: Is a violent resolution to this crisis inevitable?

Niall Ferguson: “There will be blood, in the sense that a crisis of this magnitude is bound to increase political as well as economic [conflict]. It is bound to destabilize some countries. It will cause civil wars to break out, that have been dormant. It will topple governments that were moderate and bring in governments that are extreme. These things are pretty predictable. The question is whether the general destabilization, the return of, if you like, political risk, ultimately leads to something really big in the realm of geopolitics. That seems a less certain outcome…

…It's just that I don't see it producing anything comparable with 1914 or 1939. It's kind of hard to envisage a world war. Even when most pessimistic, I struggle to see how that would work, because the U.S., for all its difficulties in the financial world, is so overwhelmingly dominant in the military world.”

Meanwhile at Tomgram: Michael Klare, A Pandemic of Economic Violence.

As people lose confidence in the ability of markets and governments to solve the global crisis, they are likely to erupt into violent protests or to assault others they deem responsible for their plight, including government officials, plant managers, landlords, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. (The list could, in the future, prove long and unnerving.) If the present economic disaster turns into what President Obama has referred to as a "lost decade," the result could be a global landscape filled with economically-fueled upheavals.

Humans facing huge population cull if global temperatures rise 4C in next 100 years.

Climate experts told New Scientist they were optimistic that humans would survive but would have to adapt.

Vast numbers would have to migrate away from the equator and towards the poles.

National borders would have to be knocked down and humans would become mostly vegetarian with most animals being eaten to extinction.

Fish numbers would drop dramatically as acid levels rose in oceans.

And of course, Jim Kunstler has stared into the abyss so long that the The Abyss Stares Back

The public perception of the ongoing fiasco in governance has moved from sheer, mute incomprehension to goggle-eyed panic as the scrims of unreality peel away revealing something like a national death-watch scene in history's intensive care unit. Is the USA in recession, depression, or collapse? People are at least beginning to ask. Nature's way of hinting that something truly creepy may be up is when both Paul Volcker and George Soros both declare on the same day that the economic landscape is looking darker than the Great Depression.

Kunstler concludes with

It's not too late for President Obama to start uttering these truths so that we can avoid a turn to fascism and get on with the real business of America's next phase of history -- living locally, working hard at things that matter, and preserving civilized culture. What a lot of us can see now staring out of the abyss is a new dark age. I don't think it's necessarily our destiny to end up that way, but these days we're not doing much to avoid it.

We have several converging crises over the next several decades:

1. Economic collapse
2. Climate change
3. Water
4. Oil
5. Food
6. Political instability

I did not include population in that list because the number of people that can be supported depends on the technology and economic system in place. These factors are geographical facts: oil and water exist in certain places and not others. Whereas water is a renewable resource, oil is not (at rates needed for current economic activity - we have burnt through 150 million years' worth of oil in 150 years).

And the comments are about the green conspiracy! Our whole fucking world is collapsing around us, and people want to carry on as normal. Ferguson, Kedrosky, and others believe that economic recovery is possible in a few years and things will be back to normal. The oil is still running out, the climate is still getting warmer, the distribution of fresh water is changing, farmland is disappearing in one place and appearing in others. People will have to move if they want to survive.