Threat levels across the board just went waaay up. Every nation bordering Russia, or even China is at risk of invasion. Everyone that doesn’t look European, sound ‘merican, or isn’t cis-straight and willing to breed is now a target. American soft (diplomatic) power will all but evaporate. With the king of bad debt at the helm, an alienated and emboldened China may even blink, selling of US assets, sending the dollar into a spiral, maybe even replacing it with the yuan, or the Euro as the world’s primary currency of exchange. The 1% will suck up wealth at a rate the world has never seen, leaving the MAGAnauts who empowered them wondering why the stock market is doing so well while they are doing so poorly. The last barriers to unlimited political spending will fall and the last shreds of the already tattered pretense that elections are not for sale will be swept away in the laser-guided gale of attack ads and sound bites. The elite will find innumerable new ways to evade the rule of law, while imposing it ever more onerously on the most vulnerable parts of society. Gerrymandering and electioneering will be both ubiquitous and extreme, locking in the current power structure so tight that representation will lag decades behind any change in the national zeitgeist.
And none of those calamities are what I’m worried about. They are just tribulations of human society. One could, if that was all the evil that flowed forth from this day, just retire like Thoreau to a Cottage and just got your teeth and hold your breath when dealing with humans was unexpectedly. But this is also the death knell of our efforts to contain the damage climate change will cause. Environmental protections will be stripped; treaties, accords, and agreements will be ignored; fossil fuel production and consumption will skyrocket; renewables will be not just de-incentivized, but actively suppressed. Carbon credits will be either perverted or outright eliminated in the US, hamstringing and demotivating the efforts of whatever countries manage to avoid following us into ignorance. The UN goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees was slipping away before, it is utterly unattainable now. The world’s largest economy stepping on the carbon gas pedal instead of the brake now, at the very last moment we had to do the really hard work, all but guarantees as inevitable scenarios so bleak that they were ridiculed in the 90’s as impossible doom-peddling by ignorant ultra-radical extremists. To me, it now looks like we are facing, within 50 years, global sea level rise of at least 10′ maybe as much as 25′. This will, when you include the inevitable, dramatic increase in the frequency and severity of typhoons and hurricanes (which we have been getting the first tastes of in recent years,) result in the loss of millions of homes in some of the most populous as well as prosperous regions of the world. Drought and wildfire that will straight up desertify some of the world’s most productive land including northern California.
That’s already trillions of dollars of damage, but the cost becomes inconceivable when you account for the virtually inevitable resource wars that will follow as every sector of every economy feels the stress of disruption and scarcity.
Then there’s the really scary ones like the collapse of the Ross ice shelf, the loss of the Thwait glacier, or the decimation of the Greenland ice sheet. All scary enough on their own, but even those lake on comparison to the global economic catastrophe, and ensuing world wars that would follow the collapse of the Atlantic Overturning Meridional Current (AMOC), of which the Gulf Stream is a part. It may already be in what’s called a bi-stable equilibrium. It has two modes, one like today’s which transports heat to Europe from the Gulf and rain to Asia, and another where it basically shuts down. One or the other is stable in most historical climate regimes, but there seems to be a point in the middle, which we may already have reached, where it will stay in either whichever one it is pushed into, however briefly. To illustrate the point, if 200 years ago a brief warming, or desalinization tend might depress the circulation for a bit, but it would bounce right back as the trend ended. But in bi-stable mode if it gets pushed too far, it doesn’t bounce back at all and the whole heat/salt conveyor shuts down, perhaps for millennia. If that happens, Northern Europe turns into Canada and the monsoons stop coming to a huge segment of the Asian population. This is a catastrophe on a scale the world has never seen. Billions of people would die.
But even this is not why I am in mourning. I mourn for life itself. I no longer see any way for us to prevent what is already the fastest mass extinction in the history of all life from becoming also the most severe. Maybe we can save some genomes in bottles in the moon, idk, but I can’t shake the feeling that we have robbed the planet in general, and my granddaughter’s children in particular, of half, or more than half, of all the species that we have ever known, and an until number that we never discovered. This is the unthinkable crime we are in the act of committing in our ignorance and fear and greed.
The worst part for me is that I moved to Montana almost thirty years ago because I saw this threat on the horizon and wanted to do something about it. I studied hard, but what I learned was that the problem wasn’t lack of knowledge, or technology, or effective policy. The problem was us. Specifically, the fires of greed, ignorance, and fear that the right wing fanned to protect their investment in the status quo. I watched as the lobbyists fed calculated disinformation to the shills their masters installed while vituperous traitors like Rush Limbaugh amplified the lies with cozy, reassuring hate and the coils of fascism wound slowly tighter around the body politic. I got discouraged, because politics sucks, and did nothing except try to live my life as a counter-example. It was never going to be enough and I knew it. Now, as my fatherland prepares to lead the world, goose-stepping over the brink, I’m left to contemplate the fact that the only thing I really did about it was try to hard not to be complicit. It doesn’t feel like enough, but neither could I imagine anything I might have done that could have stemmed the relentless tide of self-gratifying self-destruction that is about to wash over us all.
Someday soon I hope to find the strength to look for ways to help salvage what we can of this works that I love, but for now the simple act of trying to survive the crushing weight of what we have done requires all of my strength. Tomorrow is another day. Maybe tomorrow that thought might even bring me some comfort; or maybe the day after that. For now, though, the goal is just to stave off despair long enough to see another sunrise or two. If I can do that, I’ll take it from there. Hopefully, you will too, and we can figure something out together. Namaste.