QuoteSimon and his crew are hopium addicts.
I can't agree. Hopium addicts are out of touch with reality. Simon and his crew are not. They do calculations and figure this or that out, and at the end of the day they are saying. Oh fuck, we are fucked! Just like I do. Just like you do.
Who was it that was in here extolling the virtues of flow batteries a few weeks ago? Who was that hopeasaurus?
If you have criticism worth sharing we could get in touch with Simon and make a video. But if you are just bitching I'll ask why. We are all on the same team here. If Simon and I got to talking things could get interesting. We are both engineers.
Concerning hopium. Simon I and others can figure out how to make things work. Collapse could be designed with a reasonably soft landing engineered in. But that won't happen. The problem is people.
People were going off the 'deep end' concerning peak oil twenty years before climate change came along. Global heating was a back story on NPR when you and I were preaching doom and gloom.
Did we wake anybody up with our rantings? Only people who wanted to rant with us for whatever reason. People who benefit greatly from current arrangements have their own tribe. We are their enemy. They being the dominant tribe construct the narrative that keeps everyone else in thrall. It was a knee-jerk thoughtless reaction for them to recognize that we are not part of their narrative. This is something I did not understand starting out. I thought people could be convinced by logic and reason. I did not understand that cultural conditioning will defeat logic, and self-interest makes people stupid.
Simon and his crew don't get that the elite have had a few hundred years to develop an elite culture that seamlessly excludes everyone else. With an appearance of not doing so. That is the big problem. Bigger than the technical issues. Western culture is fine with some people getting some, and some people getting none.
A system that refines exploitation is not intellectually able to deal with a new world where limits make the consequences of exploitation a necessary part of the calculation. That the system can't deal with externalities and humans are unable to see externalities is bad enough. What makes things horrible is consideration of externalities cuts profit. Dealing with consequences means there is less to skim on the top. Capitalism lives off the skim. (theft)
The lifestyle of many Americans depends upon profits. In a world of change profits generally suffer.
It is easy to see the problems as technical, and the natural human urge is to solve problems. But collapse is a social problem first, and a technical problem second. Society controls what technology is used and how it is used. Simon, I and any other smarty pants who come up with a technical solutions are only pawns in a game. We are ignored unless we are useful for other reason.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. A rentier has a salary that depends on him not understand the details of where the profit he/she exploits comes from. If you have a passive income you are going to tolerate injustice. Your understandings will be by your own choice limited in scope.
Cultural hegemony keeps things going full speed to oblivion. Everyone is united in their stupidity. Nurds make You-Tube Videos that get 2K views if they are good. They imagine they make a difference. Videos that support existing arrangements dominate with millions of views.
Things could not be more fucked up now if Satan himself were pulling the strings.
It is foolish to be convinced without evidence, but it is equally foolish to refuse to be convinced by real evidence. The real evidence says that for the second month in a row CO2 is up over 1% for the year. Sorry to tell you this Greta, but your generation does not hold any power, and for all your rantings you are ignored with CO2 emissions higher than they have ever been. The dependence on the finite resource has never been higher.
I am the only one who looks at what the annual change in CO2 is every month. It is published on the main page. The calculation accounts for seasonal variation. In a nation of hundreds of millions I am the only one who does this. At a website actively repressed by the deep state.
The future of humanity is in peril, but a nation committed to quarterly profit can not see another way.
The four horsemen wait to ride. The horses chomp on the bit.