Category: Climate

I discuss how humanity must make profound systemic changes in order to avoid systemic collapse, if that’s even still possible. 

This episode was recorded on the afternoon of August 13, 2023 and it was published on August 14, 2023 at 2:53pm EDT.

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Episode transcript:

Greetings all, welcome to Aquarian Diary.

I’m your host, John Irving.

It is August 14, 2023.

This was recorded on the afternoon of August 13, 2023.

As I’ve mentioned here many times before, I do a lot of reading about current affairs locally and globally.

The main thing that’s been on my mind and that I feel like I want to convey here today is something that I have addressed before, but perhaps not as succinctly as I could. It is critically important for every human being on the planet.

As many of you know, I have followed closely the environmental crisis for many, many years. In fact, I recently wondered if I should start an entirely different platform to focus on that topic. But what I quickly realized is that it is moving so fast and that there are events occurring all around the world on a daily basis, that it would be a full-time job just to cover that topic.

It is absolutely stunning and astonishing both how quickly things are happening and how extreme these events are. Maui in Hawaii, which I’m sure everyone is familiar with, is one example.

But the Western media doesn’t do a very good job of covering events that are happening in other parts of the world, like Europe, the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, Asia, Antarctica, the Arctic, and so on. It really would be a full-time job just to stay abreast of that on a daily basis.

The real point that I want to convey, though, is that all of these developments are symptomatic of the fact that our perpetual growth paradigm is dead. It’s over. It’s done.

Our governments, our economies, our societies are still premised on the basis of perpetual growth in order to sustain living standards, financial systems, employment, healthcare, everything else.

However, contradicting that is that in recent decades, humanity—and I’m getting strong chills saying this—humanity has exceeded the carrying capacity of planet Earth.

We can no longer live and consume in the ways that we have. If we choose to do that, it will almost certainly result in a very disorderly collapse of civilization, at least as we currently understand it.

There is no way that our economy will be able to sustain the perpetual body blows, so-to-speak, that we will be experiencing in coming years and decades. None.

The infrastructure and services that we rely upon on a daily basis are already in a very degraded state of repair. The costs of unrelenting extreme weather events and highly irregular climatic changes cannot be absorbed in our current paradigm without some form of systemic social, economic or political collapse. Mark my words, this is not hyperbole.

Our current civilization arose in a period of relative climatic stability and predictability. That stability is now out the window, and it won’t be coming back in any remotely foreseeable timeframe.

One of the most shocking things about this from my perspective is that although extreme weather events are getting quite a bit of coverage because they’re dramatic, hardly anyone is talking about how this is going to affect our societies and the way we live.

Many will argue that the root of the problem is that there are too many people on planet Earth. But that is extremely misleading. The problem does not come from those in the so-called developing world. The people in the developed world consume vastly more energy and resources and have vastly higher carbon footprints than those in the developing world.

So unless you’re willing to make the unethical and immoral argument that some people should be allowed to have dramatically higher footprints than others, the onus must then fall on those of us in the developed world. And that means that we will have to dramatically curtail our consumption. Period.

We have two choices. We carry on with business as usual and end up with completely catastrophic outcomes, or we change our ways.

It’s hard to think of any politician who would have the courage to say that, for obvious reasons, even though it is absolutely true.

Now I personally am not willing to say that someone in Bangladesh, for example, shouldn’t have the same quality of life as someone in America, or Canada, or the UK, or Germany. It would be ethically indefensible for me to make a statement like that.

So as I said, it’s alarming that hardly anyone is saying this, even though it is true, and even though it is the most important thing that we need to deal with urgently right now.

So we have this epic dilemma, which is what are we going to do? Like I said, politicians won’t say this, but if we carry on with our current course, I can guarantee you that we will be facing complete calamity down the road.

It will get to the point if we cross certain tipping points, and some people are even arguing that we have already crossed some of those tipping points, or that we’re very close to crossing some of them.

We can’t put the genie back in the bottle if we do cross some of those thresholds. It will be out of our control for a very long time.

This is a really complicated subject because the whole premise of capitalism, which is the system that our governments and societies have been promoting for generations, is not just in question, it’s defunct. Meaning that it is no longer rational or defensible or sustainable.

So what will humanity do?

This is one of the biggest questions and most significant points in time in the history of civilization, if not the biggest by far.

The status quo is literally defunct. It cannot be sustained no matter what anybody tells you. We can’t have 8 billion people driving around in EVs. The biosphere will not support that. That’s fantasy. Don’t believe it for a minute.

Hardly anyone is willing to say this or discuss it, so we haven’t even gotten to the point where we’re talking about the root cause of the problem. In effect, a vast number of people are completely deluded.

We have a mass delusion on our hands because we can’t even see reality when it’s staring us directly in the face, if not taunting us, and we can’t even look at it or see it. So we have to overcome that before we can even start talking about what we need to do. That’s the truly shocking and alarming part of all this, is that there’s a tiny fraction of humanity that actually sees what’s happening.

We need a paradigm shift, and I’m not sure what can possibly trigger that other than something very dramatic and probably catastrophic, unfortunately. Again, I just don’t see how we get from here to there otherwise.

I’m not aware of any political parties that are openly acknowledging this with sufficient support or representation to affect the kinds of changes we need anywhere on the planet. In fact, we seem to be going in the opposite direction. It looks like we are choosing a path of collapse, and maybe that’s the only option given humanity’s current state of consciousness, or lack thereof.

As I record this, there are already regions of the world that are on the brink of becoming uninhabitable due to extreme temperatures. And those regions will expand in the coming years or decades. Those people are not just going to sit there and fry, and nobody in good conscience can blame them if they leave and seek safer territory. You’d do the same thing for yourself and your family if it came down to it. And the situation will worsen for years and decades to come.

Humanity must make truly epic and stunning changes, and it needs to do so very quickly. Meanwhile, we have unprecedented levels of polarization, disinformation abounds, a huge chunk of the population is completely out of touch with reality.

People are angry because there’s no stability in their worlds. But none of that will be resolved until we resolve the larger issue. And I struggle to see how we will navigate this without going over the edge.

That’s just an honest assessment of where I’m at and what my thinking is. As I’ve said before, I would prefer that we went into some kind of zero-growth-stasis position until the situation stabilized. The likelihood of that is almost nil, so it looks like we will be going through a disorderly collapse.

There are no silver bullets for this, short of shutting down industrial civilization, which has zero chance of occurring intentionally. I don’t care what anybody says, and I could post evidence all day long to back up my assertions.

So that’s the lay of the land here in the middle of August, 2023. We will have to see how this plays out.

I’ll put links in the episode description to any related content, and if you’re interested in a reading with me, I’ll put a link to that as well.

Sincere thanks to everyone who supports me, especially my YouTube members.

Thank you very much.

Take care, all the best, and I’ll talk to you again soon.

Bye for now.

End Transcript

Please see my “⁠Environment⁠” playlist for more on such topics. 

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References:

⁠Uh-Oh. Now What? – James Hansen, Aug 14, 2023 (PDF)⁠

⁠The world’s top 1% of emitters produce over 1000 times more CO2 than the bottom 1%⁠

⁠Who is really to blame for climate change?⁠

⁠A Climate Warning from the Cradle of Civilization⁠ [a must read IMO]

⁠Hot-tub-like Persian Gulf fuels 158-degree heat index in Iran⁠ [a must read IMO]

⁠Far-right outsider takes shock lead in Argentina primary election⁠

#Environment #ClimateCrisis #Spirituality

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