Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXXXV–Collapse Now To Avoid the Rush: The Long Emergency
(Original posting date: June 6, 2023)
Mexico (1988). Photo by author.
Collapse Now To Avoid the Rush: The Long Emergency
Today’s Contemplation has been prompted by yet another conversation I have had with a person who prefers not to believe the stories I tell about our predicament. Which I am totally fine with. I attempt to present my case and once the person devolves into personal attacks, childish suggestions, or simply ignores/denies the evidence (usually by way of never actually addressing the points I raise), I tend to end the dialogue with an agreement to disagree. We all believe what we want to believe so little point in belabouring the discussion with someone entrenched in their narrative.
Of the rhetorical fallacies that tend to be used against me when I highlight skepticism towards certain narratives, the latest is something along these lines: You want/wish for ‘collapse’ and a massive die-off…why don’t you start by eliminating yourself.
The thing I wish to stress is that I DO NOT wish for any type of decline/collapse, and I’ve most certainly never advocated for it to happen. I am as dependent upon our complexities as the next person, although I am working to lessen that.
As I more-or-less replied to the person: I do not want what I am writing about to occur; I am a student of pre/history observing the world and sharing my story about what I see and occasionally making suggestions on what might be wise actions to help mitigate it. In other words, ‘collapse’ appears to be happening so let’s try to prepare for it.
Do I argue for certain ‘strategies’ that would seem prudent given the biological and pre/historical precedents that suggest where our future is likely headed? Absolutely. If you have the slightest appreciation of the precautionary principle, and even some awareness of what has befallen previous complex societies throughout pre/history and how they have ‘handled’ similar situations, you would too.
But this does not mean I am looking forward to the long emergency/long descent (or worse) that appears increasingly to be where humanity is headed. In fact, given the argument that we are significantly into ecological overshoot this time around the argument for preparatory actions is quite called for. In fact, much of what I argue for is because I believe it would be wise for humanity to pay heed to John Michael Greer’s advice to ‘collapse now and avoid the rush’ so that we are better prepared for the future that we are likely going to get, whether we wish it or not.
If you’re not familiar with Greer’s reasoning for this phrase, I suggest reading the above linked post. For those who wish my take, here it is…
Industrial society (and all the complexities it entails) has been possible primarily because of the “…immense supply of cheap, highly concentrated fuel with a very high net energy…” To replace this foundational energy source in order to maintain our complex, industrial society “…has turned out to be effectively impossible.” While a ‘managed descent’ may have been possible 50+ years ago, sociopolitical decisions (along with continuing unchecked population growth) have closed off that option and instead pushed us significantly into overshoot.
Rather than thoughtfully descend (i.e., the type of ‘managed’ decline the Degrowth movement advocates), we have burned through our fundamental energy resource believing a story that the laws of physics and geology can be suspended via socioeconomic abstractions, human ingenuity, and our technological prowess.
Pre/historical evidence suggests our ‘fall’ will not be sudden in nature (commonly thought of as a ‘collapse’) for “…civilizations take an average of one to three centuries to complete the process of decline and fall…”. This ‘fall’ — that appears to have already begun and will pick up steam — will not be smooth but a series of crises across space and time, with relatively stable interludes (perhaps even some ‘recovery’) between them.
There are still choices to be made in the face of this, particularly between clinging to current lifestyles until the floor drops out from beneath that to learning the knowledge and practising the skills necessary to live well in a world of declining energy and complexities.
“Collapse now, in other words, and avoid the rush.”
What are some of the suggestions Greer makes?
Figure out how to live after the next crisis arrives and begin to live that way now. For example, if your income may be in jeopardy, begin living with less now. Get out of debt. Find much less expensive shelter. Learn practical skills so you can meet your own needs or barter with others. Weatherise your home so utilities cost less. Begin growing some of your own food.
While some envision living on an off-grid homestead away and insulated from the various crises, it is better to look at where one lives currently and how that can be made more resilient and/or self-sufficient. Take note of local resources, including human ones.
As for the utopian dream of a fanciful, high-tech future, Greer argues “There’s quite a lot of money to be made these days insisting that we can have a shiny new future despite all evidence to the contrary, and pulling factoids out of context to defend that increasingly dubious claim; as industrial society moves down the curve of decline, I suspect, this will become even more popular, since it will make it easier for those who haven’t yet had their own personal collapse to pretend that it can’t happen to them.”
And as he concludes: “… if you’re trying to exempt yourself from the end of the industrial age, nothing you can do can ever be enough. Let go, let yourself fall forward into the deindustrial future, and matters are different.”
I would tend to agree with Greer as far as the idea of a cataclysmic future being improbable, not impossible, just highly unlikely on a global scale. There are such issues as nuclear war or a large meteor strike that could occur but are far less likely (although nuclear war is appearing more probable than a large meteor hitting the planet for when hasn’t the latest, greatest weaponry not been used during war).
The highest possibility of ‘collapse’ comes from the process that archaeologist Joseph Tainter lays out in The Collapse of Complex Societies. Basically, as we encounter increasing diminishing returns on our investments in complexity, fewer and fewer benefits are accrued from our support of/investments into the sociopolitical systems that organise our society and a point arises where more and more people withdraw that support until the complexities can no longer function properly and supportive subsystems begin to fail.
As Tainter points out, a society can go a very long time experiencing this decline, with each step down in living standards being relatively minor and, with time, are accepted and adapted to as the ‘new normal’.
I have highlighted in a few multipart posts what may befall humanity as we stumble into the unknowable future:
Infinite growth. Finite Plant. What could possibly go wrong? Parts One & Two.
Energy Future. Parts 1, 2, 3, & 4.
That Uncertain Road. Parts 1 & 2.
And please note that I do refer to this inevitable simplification as ‘collapse’ not because I believe it will be a sudden, punctuated, and global event but because I tend to view the process in a broader, temporal perspective. While our ‘collapse’ may play out over a number of human generations (and be barely noticeable to many except in the sense of the past being ‘better’), in the grand scope of human 200,000–300,000 year existence, a century or three is a bump in a long and winding road.
View the following graph. If you feel this is sustainable and growth can continue because, you know, human ingenuity, you can ignore everything I’ve written above and carry on. If, however, this suggests to you an impending (or passed) tipping point of unsustainability, then you need to consider the story I’ve shared…and how you will react and act.
As I conclude in one of the posts linked above:
“And, I offer no ‘solution’ to any of the above. I have increasingly come to hold that this is all one humungous predicament without a ‘solution’. The best we might hope for is to increase local self-sufficiency of communities and cross our fingers that some might make it through the impending transition that will be the result of complex society collapse compounded by ecological overshoot. On the other hand, all the other species on our planet might be hoping for our extinction given our track record of destructive tendencies…”
If you’ve made it to the end of this contemplation and have got something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website or the link below — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).
Attempting a new payment system as I am contemplating shutting down my site in the future (given the ever-increasing costs to keep it running).
If you are interested in purchasing any of the 3 books individually or the trilogy, please try the link below indicating which book(s) you are purchasing.
Costs (Canadian dollars): Book 1: $2.99 Book 2: $3.89 Book 3: $3.89 Trilogy: $9.99
Feel free to throw in a ‘tip’ on top of the base cost if you wish; perhaps by paying in U.S. dollars instead of Canadian. Every few cents/dollars helps…
If you do not hear from me within 48 hours or you are having trouble with the system, please email me: olduvaitrilogy@gmail.com.
You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially Catton’s Overshoot and Tainter’s Collapse: see here.
Released September 30, 2024
It Bears Repeating: Best Of…Volume 2
A compilation of writers focused on the nexus of limits to growth, energy, and ecological overshoot.
With a Foreword by Erik Michaels and Afterword by Dr. Guy McPherson, authors include: Dr. Peter A Victor, George Tsakraklides, Charles Hugh Smith, Dr. Tony Povilitis, Jordan Perry, Matt Orsagh, Justin McAffee, Jack Lowe, The Honest Sorcerer, Fast Eddy, Will Falk, Dr. Ugo Bardi, and Steve Bull.
The document is not a guided narrative towards a singular or overarching message; except, perhaps, that we are in a predicament of our own making with a far more chaotic future ahead of us than most imagine–and most certainly than what mainstream media/politics would have us believe.
Click here to access the document as a PDF file, free to download.
The recent sequence of posts here on lenocracy (from Latin leno, a pimp)—that is, the form of political economy in which productive economic activity gets squeezed dry by various kinds of legally mandated pimping—has fielded a response I find interesting. Next to nobody has tried to argue that lenocracy is an unfair description of the current state of affairs in the United States and its close allies. Everyone seems quite aware of the fact that most of the people who make big money in our grand post-industrial kleptocracies are doing it by exploiting those who actually produce goods and services, in exactly the same way that a pimp exploits sex workers.
No, the question that’s come up over and over again is as simple as it is challenging: what can we do about it? I offered one answer a month ago, discussing the way that modern lenocracies work by dangling various baits in front of you. If you take the bait—and nearly everything that comes oozing out of the orifices of the consumer economy counts as bait—the hook sinks in. Walk on by without falling for the lures and you go free. That’s not a complete answer, though, and it’s worth discussing some of the other possibilities.
We can start by taking a hard look at the realities of modern life. Let’s grant that it’s increasingly hard to make honest work pay these days because a regiment of lenocrats backed by local, state, and federal laws and regulations all demand a cut of the profits. Let’s grant that lenocracy has metastasized so far that the United States can’t do simple tasks like repair a wrecked bridge or provide artillery shells for its proxy wars within a reasonable time or for a reasonable cost. Let’s grant, too, that all this is getting worse as the real economy of nonfinancial goods and services shrinks, leaving an ever-increasing horde of lenocrats frantically trying to extract their habitual take from a society in the early stages of rigor mortis. Given all this, is there anything we can do to protect ourselves from lenocracy run amok, or do we just have to hunker down and wait for the inevitable implosion of the system?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
For some time now I’ve been looking for a way to talk about one of the most common bad habits of thought in the modern industrial world. Habits like this are far more important that a casual glance might suggest. Plenty of pragmatic factors are piling up crises for our civilization just now, but many of those could be solved—or at least faced in a more constructive way—if our government and business elites could think clearly about them. It’s the fact that they don’t seem to be able to do this that makes the crisis of our time so overwhelming.
It’s really quite remarkable, when you think of it. These days, if a government bureaucracy or one of those dreary panels of multibillionaires get together to try to solve some problem, you can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll either do nothing or make the problem worse. It’s not that the people in question aren’t educated—they have the best education you can get in a modern Western society. It’s not that they lack resources—for example, the money and energy that go into those climate conferences each year, put to some productive use, could have contributed considerably to mitigating the effects of climate change. No, the problem is that the people in question are stuck in habits of thought that make it impossible for them to do anything useful in a crisis.
I know that this is a controversial claim these days. Quite a few people have become convinced that our government and corporate elites can’t possibly be as stupid as they seem. No, it’s got to be a sinister conspiracy! It’s easy to understand why that sort of thinking has become popular…
It’s been a month since I last posted on the theme of disenchantment, and a lively month at that. The cracks in America’s global empire have become increasingly visible around the world. Here at home the mentally challenged resident of the White House continues to blunder through a vague approximation of his constitutional duties while the coterie of neoconservative zealots that hand him his talking (or rather mumbling) points is busy trying to start more wars the United States no longer has the resources or the national unity to win. Donald Trump is basking in the success of his recent CNN town hall, Robert Kennedy Jr. is rising steadily in the polls as he campaigns to unseat Biden for the Democratic nomination—well, let’s just sum things up by saying that it’s a good time to go long on popcorn futures.
With all this and more happening, it may not seem timely to return to so apparently abstract a point as the historical alternation between eras of enchantment and disenchantment. Here as so often, however, appearances deceive. What Max Weber called “the disenchantment of the world” is a massive political fact, but it’s by no means as cut and dried as Weber apparently thought—and it’s also not a one-way process. Grasp the way that the modern experience of disenchantment unfolded across historical time, and where it can be expected to lead next, and you understand much that is otherwise obscure about how we got into our present predicament and what we can expect in the years ahead. This is the theme I plan on developing in this and a sequence of future posts.
Let’s start with the basics. Roughly 5% of the human race currently live in the United States of America. That very small fraction of humanity, until quite recently, enjoyed about a third of the world’s energy resources and manufactured products and about a quarter of its raw materials. This didn’t happen because nobody else wanted these things, or because the US manufactured and sold something so enticing that the rest of the world eagerly handed over its wealth in exchange. It happened because, as the dominant nation, the US imposed unbalanced patterns of exchange on the rest of the world, and these funnelled a disproportionate share of the planet’s wealth to itself.
There’s nothing new about this sort of arrangement. In its day, the British Empire controlled an even larger share of the planet’s wealth, and the Spanish Empire played a comparable role further back. Before then, there were other empires, though limits to transport technologies meant that their reach wasn’t as large. Nor, by the way, was any of this an invention of people with light-coloured skin. Mighty empires flourished in Asia and Africa when the peoples of Europe lived in thatched-roofed mud huts. Empires rise whenever a nation becomes powerful enough to dominate other nations and drain them of wealth. They’ve thrived as far back as records go and they’ll doubtless thrive for as long as human civilisations exist.
America’s empire came into being in the wake of the collapse of the British Empire, during the fratricidal European wars of the early 20th century. Throughout those bitter years, the role of global hegemon was up for grabs, and by 1930 or so it was pretty clear that Germany, the Soviet Union or the US would end up taking the prize…
It’s been a busy couple of weeks, hasn’t it? A Pfizer executive admitted under oath that all those claims that the Covid vaccine would protect you from catching Covid had no data at all backing them. Inevitably, corporate media flacks are now insisting at the top of their lungs, in the teeth of ample evidence, that nobody ever made the claims in question. Ukrainian agents used a truck bomb to damage the bridge that links Crimea to Russia; Russia, which has supposedly been running out of missiles since about a week since their forces invaded Ukraine, responded by sending a flurry of the missiles they aren’t supposed to have any more to blow up another round of Ukrainian targets, focusing on the energy and transport facilities the Ukrainians are going to need to face the massive winter offensive Russia is all too clearly preparing..
The rate of inflation here in the US has reached levels not seen since Jimmy Carter’s day, while the economy in the US and globally is reeling in ways that normally signal a serious recession on the way. The mix of inflation and recession is called “stagflation,” for those of you who don’t remember the Seventies, and it’s no fun. The prices of fossil fuels are swinging all over the place, up because supplies are dwindling, down because a failing economy means that fewer people will be able to afford to burn them. Oh, and Greta Thunberg has come out in favor of nuclear power, because it’s less ecologically damaging than burning coal. (As you’d expect from a child of privilege, the one thing she can’t possibly imagine is getting by with a lot less.)
Among the most curious features of the current predicament of industrial society is that so much of it was set out in great detail so many decades ago. Just at the moment I’m not thinking of the extensive literature on resource depletion that started appearing in the 1950s, which set out in painstaking detail the mess we’re in right now. I’m thinking of those writers who explored the decline and fall of past civilizations, in the vain hope that ours might manage to avoid making all the usual mistakes. In particular, I’m thinking of Arnold Toynbee.
Toynbee’s all but forgotten these days, but three quarters of a century ago his was a name to conjure with. His gargantuan 12-volume work A Study of History set out to trace the histories of all known civilizations and, from that data set, determine the factors that drove the rise and fall of human societies. One- and two-volume abridgements leaving out most of the supporting data were widely available back in the day—my parents, who were not exactly highbrow East Coast intellectuals, had a copy on a bookshelf in the family room when my age was still in single digits. Plenty of academic historians denounced Toynbee, but a great many people read his work and saw the value in it.
Those days are of course long past, but there’s an interesting twist to the disappearance of his ideas from the collective dialogue of our time. Those ideas weren’t rejected because they turned out to be wrong. They were rejected because Toynbee was right.
To summarize an immense body of erudite historical analysis far too briefly, Toynbee argued that new human societies emerge when a human society is faced with a challenge it can’t meet using its previous habits of thought and action…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
I didn’t think it would be necessary for me to start talking about energy issues quite so soon. Granted, industrial civilization remains hopelessly dependent for its very survival on dwindling supplies of fossil fuels, which are being used up at breakneck paces to prop up the absurdly extravagant lifestyles of a handful of rich nations. Granted, the “green energy revolution” that soaked up so much investment money in recent decades turned out to be yet another gargantuan giveaway to corporations, while plenty of more modest investments that might have done some good got deep-sixed because they didn’t make the kleptocratic rich even richer. Granted, our governments have wasted decades we didn’t have to spare and squandered resources that might have enabled us to cushion the descent into the deindustrial future ahead of us.
Even so, I thought we had a little longer before the remorseless mathematics of depletion tipped us over from rising prices to actual shortages. Of course I didn’t expect the Russo-Ukrainian War to break out, or for Europe to respond with a flurry of shrill denunciations and ineffective sanctions while still demanding that Russia keep supplying it with oil and natural gas. Russia’s angry riposte hasn’t just driven energy bills across Europe to unprecedented heights. It’s also shown just how brittle global energy markets have become—and that in turn offers fair warning of how little spare capacity the world’s remaining fossil fuel reserves have left.
Those of my readers who remember the energy crises of the 1970s, as I do, may be forgiven a certain sense of déjà vu. Back then it was a war between Israel and an alliance of Arab nations that caused a major fossil fuel supplier to yank their product from the market, sending prices skyrocketing…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
In the first two parts of this sequence of posts (1, 2), I’ve outlined the background of the Great Reset, Klaus Schwab’s dreary rehash of the last half century or so of fix-the-world schemes, and used the creation and destruction of the Georgia Guidestones as a lens through which to see how those schemes have so reliably run face first into the brick wall of reality. In this third part of the sequence I want to put those phenomena in a broader context.
My regular readers will not be surprised to hear that there are historical parallels for the situation we’re in, in which a complex society is managed by a caste of privileged intellectuals convinced that their mastery of abstract notions makes them uniquely qualified to run the world. That’s a common state of affairs at a certain point in the history of civilizations. My regular readers won’t be surprised, either, to learn that quite often the point in question is roughly where the first half of the time-honored phrase “decline and fall” gives way to the second half.
Something of the sort happens tolerably often when a clerisy ends up in control of a society. A clerisy? Why, yes. For those of my readers who aren’t familiar with the further shores of English vocabulary, a clerisy is a group of people whose claim to privilege is that they’re better educated and therefore, at least in theory, smarter than the rest of us.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was a better poet than philosopher and a better philosopher than political theorist, coined the word in 1818. He believed that in order to flourish, humanity needed the guidance of a secular organization of well-educated people to tell the rabble what to think…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
July seems to be a good time for explosions, and not just in Fourth of July fireworks displays in the US. Already this month, a bomb blew up a controversial monument in rural Georgia, while on the other side of the world in Sri Lanka an angry mob stormed the presidential palace and drove the president into exile. These two events have more in common than a first glance might suggest. A dull book in a dull blue cover sitting on the endtable next to my sofa will help explain the link between them.
The book is Covid-19: The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret. It was published in 2020 by the house press of Schwab’s pet organization, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and got the usual praise from the usual pundits in the allegedly serious end of the corporate media. Somewhat less usually, it also attracted a great deal of attention from conspiracy theorists around the world, who made the same kind of hay out of it that their equivalents did two decades ago from George Bush’s offhand remark about a “new world order.” Mention the Great Reset in a good many circles these days and you can count on the sort of reaction you’d expect from talking about the Ku Klux Klan in your local African-American neighborhood.
There are valid reasons for that reaction, though they’re not among the points your common or garden variety conspiracy theorist is likely to mention first in conversation. Those reasons also benefit from a little explanation. To understand why so bland and inconsequential a volume as Covid-19: The Great Reset has gotten the reputation of a latter-day Mein Kampf, it’s helpful to start from a different point: the simple fact that the book is stunningly unoriginal.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Well, we definitely seem to have passed a threshold of sorts. For most of the sixteen years since I started blogging, one of the things I had to point out constantly to my readers was the slow pace of historical change. Whenever I posted an essay on the twilight of industrial society, I could count on fielding at least one comment from a reader who expected the entire modern world to crash and burn in the next few months. I’d have to patiently remind them that Rome wasn’t sacked in a day—that it takes years of breathtakingly moronic decisions motivated by mindless greed, vicious partisan hatred, blind ideological dogmatism, and a total unwillingness to think about the long-term consequences of short-term decisions, to bring a civilization down.
Now of course all through the years while I was telling people this, decisions of the kind I’ve just described, guided by motives of the sort I’ve just characterized, were standard operating procedure throughout the industrial world. Those proceeded to have their usual effect. I still don’t expect modern civilization to crash to ruin in the next few months, but it’s reached the point that I no longer have to tell people that the Long Descent won’t show up as soon as they think. No, at this point it’s my ironic duty to suggest that they make whatever preparations they have in mind sooner rather than later, because the world shows no signs of waiting for them.
As I write this, the most obvious set of problems has to do with the economies of the United States and its client states. Those of my readers who follow financial media already know that signs of economic trouble are elbowing one another out of the way to get to the front pages…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
As I write these words, the Russo-Ukrainian war has raged for a week. To a great many people, crises like these make the theme of my recent posts here—the potential of the human imagination—seem wholly irrelevant. That’s a common mistake, but it’s still a mistake. To begin with, let’s please remember that wars and the political and economic crises that drive them are normal parts of human experience. Granted, for the last three quarters of a century there’s been very little open warfare in the industrial world, but in the nonindustrial world—which is after all where most human beings live—insurgencies, civil wars, and wars between nations have been very nearly as common as ever.
The industrial nations have been relatively peaceful because they’ve been subject to the global hegemony of the United States. That hegemony is cracking around us, and the Ukraine war puts the decline in American power into high relief. As something like 225,000 Russian troops drive deep into Ukraine, supported on the ground by tanks and artillery and from the air by waves of fighter-bombers and cruise missiles, and Ukranian military units and civilian irregulars confront them on battlefields scattered across Europe’s second largest country, the US response consists of moving a few token forces to countries well out of the line of fire, and imposing yet another round of financial sanctions aimed at Russian politicians—you know, the sort of meaningless gestures that have reliably failed to accomplish anything when used against other hostile nations for decades now. It’s a good question why this response remains so rigidly glued in place, despite its abject failures…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
As I write these words, the Russo-Ukrainian war has raged for a week. To a great many people, crises like these make the theme of my recent posts here—the potential of the human imagination—seem wholly irrelevant. That’s a common mistake, but it’s still a mistake. To begin with, let’s please remember that wars and the political and economic crises that drive them are normal parts of human experience. Granted, for the last three quarters of a century there’s been very little open warfare in the industrial world, but in the nonindustrial world—which is after all where most human beings live—insurgencies, civil wars, and wars between nations have been very nearly as common as ever.
The industrial nations have been relatively peaceful because they’ve been subject to the global hegemony of the United States. That hegemony is cracking around us, and the Ukraine war puts the decline in American power into high relief. As something like 225,000 Russian troops drive deep into Ukraine, supported on the ground by tanks and artillery and from the air by waves of fighter-bombers and cruise missiles, and Ukranian military units and civilian irregulars confront them on battlefields scattered across Europe’s second largest country, the US response consists of moving a few token forces to countries well out of the line of fire, and imposing yet another round of financial sanctions aimed at Russian politicians—you know, the sort of meaningless gestures that have reliably failed to accomplish anything when used against other hostile nations for decades now. It’s a good question why this response remains so rigidly glued in place, despite its abject failures…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
In a post here two weeks ago I discussed the disastrous failure of imagination on the part of the industrial world’s governing classes. Since then—well, let’s just say that for connoisseurs of elite cluelessness, it’s a target-rich environment out there.
We’ll choose one such target more or less at random. Last week’s news was briefly illuminated, if that’s the word, by yet another claim that fusion power is racing to the rescue of the industrial world, bearing “near-limitless clean power” to solve the climate crisis and bail out the otherwise unsustainable lifestyles of our society’s privileged classes. The handwaving this time emanated from the Joint European Torus (JET) in Culham, England, where scientists managed to sustain a fusion reaction for a little more than twice as long as any previous fusion device. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? The excitement may flag a bit if you read the fine print and discover that the new record was around five seconds.
The scientists boasted that during that five seconds, the reaction produced enough energy to power one house for a day. If this seems impressive to you—I have to say it doesn’t do much for me—keep in mind also that the energy they’re talking about is raw heat. They didn’t factor in the inevitable losses that come in when you take that heat, convert it into electricity via steam turbines or the like, and send it out into the grid. Nor did they subtract from their machine’s output the very considerable inputs of energy that had to go into making the reaction happen—fusion only happens at extremely high temperatures, and a tokamak-style reactor like the one in Culham also requires fantastically strong magnetic fields to confine the hot plasma…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Maybe it’s true that life really does imitate literature. Over the last week or so, certainly, a detail from one of my favorite works of imaginative fiction played out at least twice in the real world, with microphones live and cameras rolling. I’m thinking here first of German Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, who promoted vaccine mandates with this bit of fascinating logic: “No one will be vaccinated against their will; the vaccine mandates will simply lead people, ultimately, to accept voluntary vaccination.” See if you can find a way to parse those words that makes sense of them. I can tell you already that it doesn’t help to read them in the original German.
Then there’s Jen Psaki, spokesflack-in-chief for poor bumbling Joe Biden. She was asked by a reporter at a recent presser about the people, and of course there are a great many of them, who are increasingly worried about the future of the United States under Biden’s inept leadership. Her response? “My advice to everyone out there who’s frustrated, sad, angry, pissed off, feel those emotions, go to a kickboxing class, have a margarita.” For sheer crazed detachment from the world the rest of us inhabit, that’s hard to beat, especially when you recall that her boss campaigned saying he would, you know, fix the country’s problems. Maybe her words make more sense in German, or for that matter in pig Latin, but I doubt it.
What all this brings to mind, of course, is the climactic scene in C.S. Lewis’s tremendous fantasy That Hideous Strength. The villains of the piece, a collection of arrogant technocrats among whom Psaki and Lauterbach would fit in seamlessly, are gathered at their headquarters at Belbury for a banquet…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
