Apocalypse no. 1

 Part of an occasional series

Albert Goodwin, Apocalypse
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apocalypse-Albert_Goodwin.jpg

You could say I'm doomer adjacent.

I have friends, acquaintances, and colleagues who are full-on doomer, and I understand their arguments.

On one side, there's what we're doing to the natural systems that support us. At the broadest level, global warming of course, but we're pushing at ecosystems and resources in lots of other ways as well. This is a problem of having too much access to fossil fuels for our own good.

On the other side, the idea of peak oil raises the possibility that we don't have enough easy access to fossil fuel to maintain the way of life we've come to take for granted.

Too much and not enough at the same time. I understand the argument, and I can't prove it's wrong.

I used to be full doomer myself, and in 2008-09, I expected that's what we were seeing. I was clearly wrong, so I've learned to be more cautious about forecasts.

Understanding the deep forces beneath a situation is useful, but does little to help you predict the details of how things will unfold.

For example, geologists armed with the model of plate tectonics have the tools to understand why earthquakes happen, and that earthquakes will continue to happen, and where they're likely to happen. But they don't know where the next one will be, or when, or how far below the surface the epicenter will be. They understand the deeper forces, but can't predict the details.

If doomers are right, they're in the same boat. Knowing that our current path cannot be maintained is not enough to know how and when we get forced off of it.

And maybe the Musk-Trump presidency is exactly that: the doomers have been correct, and what's now playing out is just the specific realization that doomers knew was coming but couldn't predict.

There's plenty of suffering in the world as it is, but we are also, astonishingly, keeping 8 billion people more or less fed. And for all the violence that happens, we're killing each other at much lower rates than we could be.

We've built an intricate global system to produce enough food and goods for everyone, even if not everyone gets enough, and to keep violent conflict at a simmer rather than a boil. It's a system of alliances, of global trade, of international rules observed far from perfectly, but still making a difference.

It could be better - it should be better.

But it has been keeping us out of the abyss.

And for better or worse, the U.S. has played the lynchpin role in that system.

Now we've handed control of the U.S. to a band of people with no comprehension for how the parts fit together.

I can see lots of ways in which this doesn't end well.

If the doomers have been right, we had to get here one way or another.

2025 is merely the specific, absurd way we're doing it.

For more on the present apocalypse, see here.