Tag: climate change

Review: Waste Land by Robert D. Kaplan

Amazon link to Waste Land

My fourth (read) book by Kaplan is the apex of his thesis. What thesis? First, geography matters. Still true, Kaplan says, but in this book, modified by other forces. Second, geography does not determine history but strongly conditions it. This conditioning remains, but a set of global and interlocking destabilizing phenomena skew its impact. Third, individuals make a difference from two directions. On one side are rare individuals, typically members of the political elite, whether democratic or autocratic, whose choices can shift historical momentum in one direction or another. Kaplan refers to these individuals as “hinge persons.” On the other side is the mob (and he means a literal mob), whose actions can constrain, for good or ill, what the elite can do, even having the ability, sometimes, to force them from power.

Waste Land is Kaplan’s most inclusive view of everything, and its overall effect is pessimistic. He considers:

  1. Rising populations are, in most places, becoming poorer by the year. Many populations, including China’s, are rapidly aging and shrinking, deviating from the typical demographic trend. By contrast, Africa, which in 2025 hosts about twenty percent of the world’s population, is expected to grow to forty percent by 2050. India, South America, and much of Southeast Asia are also increasing. Overpopulation exacerbates every other destabilizer.
  1.  The fragile economics of interconnected supply chains rest on a non-existent global political order. An international order only appears to exist when relations between nations are peaceful. However, peace between trading partners can easily collapse: witness Russia versus the EU. As the population expands and, in particular, as expectations rise (see technology below), continuing peace and progress depend on the smooth functioning of these mechanisms.
  1. The technology revolution, and in particular the now globe-spanning Internet. People in poor places now see how people in rich places live, stoking demand for a bigger slice of the pie. Events are reflected across the world almost instantly, but not their more nuanced causes or other details. Partial information can impel political elites to act precipitously before they fully understand what has happened. The lack of detail also opens the door to malicious actors who take such opportunities to flood the Internet with false information, lending strength to counterproductive, precipitous action, sometimes by mobs. AI, for all the good it could do, also enhances this problem. Large Language Model AI can generate such volumes of disinformation and misinformation at the behest of malicious actors that it becomes impossible to discern what is true from what is false.
  1. Pollution and ecological degradation. We are poisoning our biosphere. Carbon and methane foul our atmosphere, the oceans become acidic, and plastic accumulates on our cropland, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Most of the Earth’s populations now live with measurable amounts of plastic in their brains. Microplastics are bad. Nanoplastics—so small that ordinary microscopes cannot see them —are much worse. A disproportionate amount of these (estimates vary from 30 to 70 percent) comes from one source: the daily wearing down of trillions of automobile and truck tires, whose residue is picked up by winds and rain and deposited everywhere. Nor is plastic the only material poisoning us. Industries and large-scale farms have been dumping toxic pollutants into waterways and landfills for two centuries. Many of the coastal dead zones and declines in fish and shellfish populations stem from this. More esoterically, every satellite that burns up in the atmosphere releases toxic metals that slowly settle into the air we breathe. The settling process can take a decade or two, but satellites have been burning up at an increasing rate, year after year, for over sixty years.  Kaplan doesn’t get into these last details. I include them for the edification of my readers.
  1. Resource exhaustion. In the late twentieth century, oil appeared to be a significant constraint. We have figured out how to coax more from the Earth, but there is still only a limited amount in the ground. Today, water is the greater geopolitical issue. Half the world lives with water scarcity. Larger populations demand more water, while the sources of water are shrinking. The glaciers that supply fresh water to much of the world are shrinking faster than anyone thought possible. Upstream countries (China in Tibet, Turkey in the Middle East, and Ethiopia in North East Africa, to name a few) are damming rivers to hold more of the water for themselves while the downriver nations dry up even faster than they otherwise would. If anything immediately exposes the lack of a formal global order, it is this.
  1. Climate change is the bookend to population expansion. The carbon we put into the atmosphere is slowly warming the planet. Warming the planet is akin to pressing down on the accelerator of a car. More energy means faster transitions in our weather, more tornadoes and hurricanes, floods, and wildland fires. More energy means more chaotic behavior. Wind, floods, and fires destroy crops, making it harder to feed growing populations as seasonal cycles (longer droughts, larger floods) become less reliable. Sea levels are rising steadily as glaciers melt away. Even the Antarctic and Greenland glaciers are melting back more rapidly than expected. 

Everything in the above list is a destabilizer of what falsely appears to be a world order based on trade, and it so happens that at this historical moment, what order exists is being deliberately undermined by a hinge person: the presently unhinged president of the United States.

What does a destabilized world look like? We are already experiencing it, and the international state of affairs is on a deteriorating path. More and deadlier wars, mass migration, expanding disease, and starvation of people due to food and water shortages. As resources dwindle, those places that have vital resources will hoard them. More nations will become failed states. More people will be left to their own devices with ever-diminishing resources, along with steadily rising temperatures. There will be no safe place to move tens or even hundreds of millions of starving people. Wars of the have-nots against the haves will become an existential necessity: starvation the only other option. All this Kaplan foresees.

But even Kaplan does not see (yet) how climate change, in combination with ecosystem collapse (to which climate change contributes directly), will gradually grow to overwhelm everything else, possibly precipitating a global nuclear holocaust. Even if hinge people prevent the exchange of H-bombs, conditions everywhere will grow worse at an ever-quickening pace. Year after year, disaster mitigation will consume more of the world’s accumulated capital. The U.S., the world’s wealthiest country, cannot keep up with its annual disaster bill even now. Fragile supply lines will collapse if there is no capital to maintain them. In no place on Earth will there be seasonally reliable weather in which to grow the food needed to feed the planet’s population.

Technology will not save us. Capital, not to mention polluting energy, is required to maintain the technology we have, from the mining and smelting of raw materials to transport and assembly—and maintenance—of finished products. Electricity grids will fail when supply chains break, and there are no parts to maintain them. Our technological way of life will come to an end. With the collapse of industrial capacity, large portions of the Earth will become uninhabitable due to extreme temperatures. With no viable air conditioning or sufficient water, through much of the year, temperatures will exceed the limits of the human body to cool itself.

The severity and frequency of humanitarian crises will grow in inverse proportion to the world’s ability to mitigate them. It will not be possible for parts of the world to assist other parts because disasters will become financially and then physically overwhelming everywhere, and roughly at the same time. 

As energy, food, and water become scarce or vanish, protest mobs seeking the impossible — to recover what has been lost — will grow and become progressively more violent, accelerating the decline of order. Local, national, and international orders will unravel. In the end, anarchy, Kaplan’s most dreaded political outcome, will prevail everywhere. 

Kaplan tells us that even all of the destabilizers taken together do not determine our future. Hinge people may redirect the course of history into stabilizing channels. I believe he knows in his heart that it is too late. Summing up his take on the world situation as a whole, I have to think Kaplan’s message is: we’re fucked! 

Here are some references pertaining to claims I’ve made above. If I have reviewed these in the blog, I will link to my review. The source link is always in there.

On the world’s fresh water problem.

On the plastic problem.

On the economics of disaster mitigation.

On the unraveling of the world order: From Peter Zeihan, and another from Kaplan

The climate problem

Review: Nature’s Mutiny by Philipp Blom

Pure history, 1570 through 1680, mostly of Europe, though Blom touches on the rest of the world from time to time. Why Europe? Because the records are the most extensive. Why those dates? Because they are the coldest (with some exceptional outliers before and after) period of the “Little Ice Age,” and it is that period, and the social, cultural, economic, and political changes that occurred during that century, largely compelled by the cold, that this book is about.

Earth scientists call the five centuries between 1300 to 1800 C.E. the “Little Ice Age.” At the beginning of this period, the Earth began to cool, reaching its lowest temperature, 2C below the 1300 average around 1570, and remaining there until 1680 or so when it began slowly to warm back to pre-1300 levels reaching them in the mid-1850s—Note that this is fifty years after the beginning of the industrial revolution. There have been other coolings in the not-to-distant past. The Earth’s northern hemisphere became unusually cold from 535 to around 545 C.E., but this shorter (10-year) cooling can be traced directly to large Icelandic volcanic eruptions. No one quite knows what factors contributed to the much longer cool period beginning in 1300. 

So what happened? Well, for one thing, the weather changed. More storms, more droughts, much colder summers. Crops could not grow properly in foreshortened growing seasons; fruits would not ripen. In short, people starved. The result, over the first two generations of the coldest period, was a revolution in economics, trade, and agriculture that saw small subsistence farming converted into much larger, more efficient farming that provided for storage of excess product in good years (there were some) and trade in the bad ones. Such changes proceeded at different rates in different parts of Europe. Some of this difference was driven by political and religious ideology (Spain and Italy were more conservative than England or Scandinavia) and partly by climate. Spain was colder than usual but not as cold as Denmark.

There was also a revolution in thinking supported by the availability of books, thanks to Guttenberg. The foundations of “The Enlightenment” were laid in this period. Blom spends much of the book describing the thinking and the thinkers of this period and, in particular, their new-found ability to move around the continent, relocating to places where their thinking was better appreciated. This was the beginning of modern science and political philosophy. Blom asserts that all of these changes were more or less directly (economics and politics) or indirectly (philosophy, nascent science) tied to the cold. 

Ending the book, Blom asks what the Little Ice Age can teach us about our present issues with climate change. Alas, there isn’t much it can teach us except that we should prepare for a long bout with geophysical changes (and their effects like reduction in food production, pandemics, and wars) that will surely cause a complete rearrangement of global civilization, including the likely (Blom doesn’t say this but read between the lines) collapse of the present world order. The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) was right in the middle of the cold.

Alas, our situation is very different, something Blom mentions but does not elaborate. In the Little Ice Age, sea levels dropped a bit, something easier to deal with than our present situation. Moreover, our present situation is a result of our activity. There were not enough humans on Earth to have greatly impacted the global climate. Lastly, in the past, the climate changed and then changed back. It isn’t going to change back this time. Even should humans, or at least their industrial activity, be extinguished, and the population shrinks to where it was in 1600 or earlier, the climate will not “change back” for possibly thousands, even tens of thousands, of years. See my review of The Uninhabitable Earth.

Book Review: The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh, 2019 on Amazon

This was a somewhat disappointing book. Amitay Ghosh is an Indian novelist. His contention in this nonfiction work is that novelists, more specifically writers of “serious literary fiction” (compared, say, to science fiction), are not taking on or dealing with the challenge of climate change. Why? Ghosh gives a few related reasons. They come down to the modern novel’s focus on character and its—his, hers, or theirs—interaction with the world, usually leading to some triumph of the human spirit. In other words, the humans of modern novels control (more or less and sometimes imperfectly) their destinies in spite of what the world throws at them. We moderns are (so novels would have us believe) largely responsible for the character of our lives. Climate change, Ghosh believes, has, or will, put paid to this notion (which is true), but serious novelists have not caught up. Serious novelists are still writing novels in which humans, for good or ill, are in control or end up in control.

Ghosh spends much of the book connecting the modern novel to the “industrial age,” in other words, to the world’s carbon economy. He does a good job tracing this parallel evolution, particularly as it unfolded in India, but not ignoring the rest of the world. The problem is that this connection is indirect. It is a coincidence not because the modern novel—not to mention the novelist—is independent of the carbon economy but in the sense that the carbon economy is responsible for modernity in general, and the modern novel, the “we are in control” trope, is merely one expression of modernity like everything else. 

But there is more coincidence here. There are many modern literary novels whose story occurs in the context, say, of big wars. Now, wars are caused by humans living now (or when the war happens), while climate change is the result of human activity over the past 275-plus years—and more especially the last 100 years. From a literary viewpoint, what big war has in common with climate change is that modern character-oriented stories cannot encompass the whole of it, instead focusing on the effect of the over-arching event on the smaller events of individual people’s lives. Like war events, climate events are discrete.

But there is also a difference between big war and climate change. People, governments, have control over big wars in that they can and do eventually stop them, if only for a time. No one alive today, in 2025, nor anyone who lives through the next ten generations is going to block the oncoming impact (in discrete events—more floods, droughts, heat waves, sea level rise, etc) of climate change! Indeed if we ceased human production of atmospheric carbon tomorrow, the worldwide climate—cascades like melting permafrost and enormous annual forest fires having already been triggered—would continue to grow more inimical to human life for the next thousand years (see The Uninhabitable Earth by Wallace-Wells)!

The “out of context” problematic nature of climate change (compared, say, to war) is some part of Ghosh’s point. It isn’t that the modern novelist cannot write poignant stories about people living through climate-driven excessive heat, or floods, or what-have-you. Grapes of Wrath is nothing if not that. The problem is, I think that a hypothetical climate-change-driven novelist cannot end the novel on a note implying mankind (instantiated in the novel’s characters) still has some control over his physical environment. If the novel is to be written for or about this time—the first half of the twenty-first century—the characters involved might make spiritual, moral, or intellectual progress. But against the weather, the atmosphere, and oceans, the characters must, in the end, be crushed.

What is a novelist to do? Ghosh never tells us, even tentatively. It’s the one thing I was looking for in the book. If, as I assert, modern novelists can write such novels, then why aren’t they? Ghosh’s final position on this question seems to be that they haven’t broken free of the human-ultimatly-in-control trope. Perhaps he is right about this, but surely there are some serious modern novelists who are willing to cite climate change along with human stupidity, develop sympathetic characters, and then kill everybody off. Kurt Vonnegut’s Glapagos comes to mind. 

What, as a writer, could I do? Could a modern novel encompass climate change in the abstract? What would such a novel look like? It might be more like The Odyssey than a modern novel. Characters might develop over volumes as some intrepid band navigates the globe, encountering one disastrous effect of climate change after another. In each place, some climate-related effect is responsible for the death of one or more members of the group. In the end, the last member must also die—symbolic of the inevitable future collapse of our present civilization—and not too distant a future at that. The project is too big a bite for me, but perhaps Ghosh might give it a go.

My Fiction

As of December 2024 there are four novels (five counting an anonymous novella) published on Amazon. All but the novella are published in Kindle (recommended) and paperback form. There are also reviews published here by guest author Wehttam Tropapar. I will link to Mr. Tropapar’s reviews below. There are links to the books on Amazon in each review.

Foreign Agent. 2021

Foreign Agent was conceived while I was taking a shower, having just finished joking with my girlfriend about Chinese technology (his television, Alexa, phones, etc.) monitoring our sex. I joked that I should invoice the Chinese. As I go off to my shower, I say to her: “The only fantasy in all of this is that the Chinese would pay me.” In the shower, I had an epiphany! “I could,” I said to myself, “simply make believe the Chinese would pay me”—not for sex, but for my geopolitical opinion! Sex was an added bonus. And so Foreign Agent was born.

Foreign Agent the Last Chapter. 2022

Foreign Agent was to be a stand-alone novel. I had no thought to write another. But some months after the publication, in another shower, I had another epiphany. There was an element of the first novel, the aliens mentioned only in its last chapter, that could be the basis of a second novel, and so Foreign Agent the Last Chapter was born! This novel is closely tied to the first. The locale and characters are the same; only time has passed.

Cult of Aten. 2023

Once again, in the shower, I wistfully realize that my two novels are not selling very well—a few copies a year, maybe! But what might happen, I wonder, if the Cult of Aten (conceived in the second novel) were made real and took off? That became the basis of the third novel, the Cult and the first two books becoming wildly successful! But while the first two novels are ostensibly drafted by Francis Nash in Bangkok, this one is written by me-as-myself. The setting and characters—except for introductory mentions establishing context for the reader—are entirely different. If Foreign Agent and Foreign Agent the Last Chapter are brothers, Cult of Aten is more of a distant cousin and can be read as a stand-alone novel.

LoveMe Inc. 2024

My fourth novel, LoveMe Inc., is entirely independent of the other novels. Narrated by a 38-year-old Matthew (who is not supposed to be me), the novel takes place near Washington, D.C., in 2027-9 and is something of a political thriller. There are a dozen or so main characters, but the central trio includes a libido-charged artificial intelligence conspiring to take control of U.S. and international politics based on ideas found in its training documents—which happen to include—surprise, surprise—the three prior novels of Matthew Rapaport!

The Out of Town Buyer (Kindle only)

The Out of Town Buyer is a co-authored novella, my first non-short-story piece of literature, written in 2005-6 but not published until 2012. The authors are listed as Anonymous & Anonymous to reflect the joint authorship and also hide themselves as both were married (one still is) at the time of the writing. Discovering that J (the co-author) was herself a stimulating erotica writer, I proposed that we write a story together. She proposed that we get together to “do some research.”

The story idea was that each scene (the sex and what happens before and in between the sex) would be crafted in detail and that each author would take a paragraph or two to describe that part of the scene in first person from their own viewpoint, the shifting voices being signaled by a change in font. Together (sometimes in bed), they mapped out the story paragraph by paragraph.

Unlike the later novels, part story and part sex, the novella is, except for an introductory few pages where we meet, all about the sex. My primary aim was to coax J into describing her orgasms. The reader will have to judge my degree of success.

***

Sex in the novels: Through the 1980s, 90s, and into the early 2000s, I wrote a half dozen pornographic short stories published on the Usenet (it was one of these stories, published in 2005 on Literotica, that brought J and me together to write The Out of Town Buyer). In those stories, excessively erotic explicitness is the backbone of the writing’s humor. This practice is only a little smoothed out in the novella, and sex remains over-described in the first two novels. When I wrote Cult of Aten, I decided it was too much of a good thing. In the longer form, the over-description got tiring. As a result, most of the over-description and even some, but by no means all, of the explicitness is removed in Cult of Aten, and this process advances in LoveMe Inc., where even more of the sex, but not all, is closer to soft-core.

Review: It’s OK to be Angry about Capitalism by Bernie Sanders

I like Bernie Sanders. I have a lot of sympathy for him, and I agree with most of what he says in this book. However, I have a few quibbles I’m going to discuss here. 

Mr. Sanders addresses seven primary areas:

  • Collapsing Health Care
  • Collapsing Education
  • The Crumbling Media
  • The Obscene Wealth Gap
  • Monied capture of the Democratic Party
  • Climate Change and the Petroleum Industry
  • Labor – Unions, Corporate Representation, and the work-day

I have nothing to say in this essay about the first five. Sanders makes a superb case for every one of them. I’m going to talk about the last two, and concerning labor, only his work-day proposal because, unfortunately, like petroleum, it is linked to climate change.

THE CLIMATE CHANGE PROBLEM

Climate change is the existential crisis of our time. It is a crisis we can no longer block or even substantially mitigate for much longer. Our present global industrial and economic system is doomed. It does not mean the extinction of humanity. It does mean the end of our present way of life (see my review of The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells with many other links). 

The petroleum industry is not solely responsible for the problem as Sanders implies. They did not force us, from the earliest decades of the 20th Century, to rest our entire economy on oil. Before there was an oil economy there was coal, the basis of early industrialization for both Europe and America. Coal is even dirtier than oil, but the Earth had far fewer people in those days, and few developing industrial nations. As early as 1850 scientists warned that carbon dioxide would begin to warm the planet when annual production of the gas exceeded the Earth’s capacity to absorb it. At the time, no one knew when that would be, or how the warming would manifest itself in weather patterns. Some suggested a new ice age. Wait a thousand years. That may still happen.

By the 1970s, there was enough data to see that the warming process had already begun. The petroleum industry didn’t have to lie about it—although they did lie. No one listened to the science, which, by then, was long available to the public. The petroleum industry did not force consumers to buy more cars, and then bigger cars. They did not force the American government to build out a national highway system (instead of improving the railroads) or deregulate the airlines resulting—over the ensuing decades—in a hundredfold increase in flight miles per year. Consumer choice, abetted by government policy did all that. Lastly, the petroleum industry did not force other large nations—China and India in particular—to choose to industrialize like the U.S. and Europe spending the latter half of the 20th Century “catching up,” which, in their case, meant burning a lot of coal.

The petroleum companies never had to lie. Even had they told us one hundred years ago that increased use of fossil fuels would eventually upset the global climate balance, people, and in particular governments (think military competition and technology), would have felt compelled to use fossil fuels to feed growing populations, expand their economies, defend their territories, or engage in naked belligerence. One hundred years ago a fully formed sovereign world government might have acted effectively to prevent what is happening to the climate now. There was no world government then and there isn’t one now. The competition goes on. It is impossible to stop—until we are all dead.

Curtailing the use of fossil fuels sufficiently to bend the temperature curve down even one hundred years from now—it is too late to do anything about the next hundred or more years—we would have to cut their use by ninety percent immediately. No more vacation flying or driving, no more plastic, no more automobile or boat racing, no gas-powered lawnmowers—no recreational or entertainment-related use of fossil fuels whatsoever! Batteries will not save us. A Tesla must be driven fifty-thousand miles before the carbon cost of its manufacture (including the batteries) drops below that of a gas-powered car and that doesn’t count the carbon cost of battery recycling. We do not even ban professional automobile racing, a sport built around burning petroleum! That’s insane! 

The only fuel that could have saved us is hydrogen from seawater produced by renewable energy (whose manufacture has its own enormous carbon cost). Had the world begun that conversion seventy-five years ago—a conversion requiring a lot of carbon to build out—we might be there now. It is far too late.   

Of course, my recommendation above is both economically and politically impossible—globally! Every modern economy in the world would collapse immediately. A billion people would be thrown out of work and many would starve. Every politician in power, or who hopes, someday, to be in power, lies about climate change. The lie is that we can still do much about it. We cannot. 

THE THREE OR FOUR DAY WORK WEEK

Climate change is not specifically an issue of the political left. Labor policy very much is such an issue and Sanders tells us the forty-hour work week (established roughly a hundred years ago) has outlived its utility. Believe me, I get it. I’m retired now but I worked for “the man” for forty years always, officially anyway, a forty-hour week. Would I have supported a shorter week for the same pay? You shouldn’t have to ask. Bernie’s suggestion ensures full (or fuller) employment, and that would be a good thing.

The problem (I said above this issue is connected to climate change) is what the bulk of the working population would do with their extra leisure time. If people used the time to advance their education, to read—or write—more books, if they used their leisure to do philosophy, to produce art, to help aged neighbors, foster local athletics, exercise, play with their children in their own backyards, or help to grow food in local gardens, the three or four-day workweek would be a social and cultural blessing. But that is not what most people would do. They would use that time to travel, to drive and fly, to water ski, pilot ATVs across the eroding Earth, jet ski over increasingly polluted waters, or to go (travel) to more concerts and professional sporting events—automobile racing anyone? In short, they would consume more fuel belching even more carbon into the atmosphere, and that is all I’m going to say on the subject.

It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism by Bernie Sanders 2022

A “cry of the heart” from a principled politician is refreshing. I have no objection to some people being more prosperous than others, and neither does Mr. Sanders. But the wealth disparity in the U.S. is genuinely obscene and more so in that the wealthiest among us do not contribute proportionally to maintain everything needed to keep their capital flows going. Every branch of the U.S. government is now captured by monied interests, the legislature most of all, and this is true at both national and State levels. Sanders repeatedly touches on this issue, and rightly so. It is the core of our problem.

In some detail, Sanders covers health care, education, child care, the media (all types), and our political process. His overarching issue is the class conflict between labor and capital; between the owners of concentrated capital, and the population who labor to produce the goods and services that generate the wealth. He is right. Sanders is no Marxist. He is not opposed to class distinctions. He wants to make the distinctions more balanced and he is right to do so because the present disparity is causing tens of millions to suffer in one way or another. 

Sanders paints with a broad brush—necessary to keep the book of moderate length and easily read. He succeeds on both counts, but there is a price to be paid. Many of his arguments are oversimplified. The petroleum industry—even despite its decades of obfuscation on the subject—is not solely responsible for climate change. A great deal of that accountability belongs to consumers, most of whom are of the laboring class.

Sanders writes a lot about the disarray of the present Democratic party and how it has come about. He is right about much of it. Citizens United in 2009 did not help, forcing Democrats into the same fund-raising frenzy from the rich as the Republicans. But one thing he doesn’t mention is the present cultural obsession with identity politics, a phenomenon whose emergence has been solely an effort of the political left beginning in the 1970s. As much as anything else, besides money, this has distracted the Democratic Party from the wider issue of class. No matter to what race you belong, or LGBTQ+ letter you choose for yourself, you are still, most likely, among the laboring class. That most fundamental, political divide is now diffused by the demands of alternate identities. 

I am being perhaps unfair to Sanders. His goal is not an exhaustive analysis of factors responsible for America’s social, cultural, and political unraveling. He wants us to aspire to a better American society for all, even capitalists who will face less resentment should Sanders’ vision for balancing the scales ever come about. It might never be possible, but it is a good and hopeful vision.

Review: The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan, 2022

I have issues with this book (as always the full Amazon review is included below), but none of them involve the author’s contention that the present global civilization is going to unwind back a century or two (possibly much more) starting, well, now. My main problem has to do with Zeihan’s treatment of climate change but in addition, and in general, the problem is his own failure to fully integrate the impact of all the unwinding that will take place along every dimension he explores. I will give one example.

Zeihan says that as the world’s land becomes mostly barren again (shortages of water, fertilizer, and fuel for farm machinery) we might yet be able to grow more food on what remains thanks to genetic engineering. He forgets however that genetic engineering is an incredibly high-tech process demanding inputs (chemicals, plastics, facilities, instruments, electricity, computers) that will no longer be reliably available even in the best-off places. There are parts of the book where he goes to some lengths to illustrate the effect of such overlaps, so it surprises me to find such failures, and the elephant in the room is climate change.  

I sent Peter Zeihan an email after reading “The Dis-United Nations” suggesting he read Wallace-Wells’ “The Uninhabitable Earth”. I do not know if he took me up on my suggestion and this present book has no bibliography. From what he does say about climate’s impact on his geopolitical subject matter it does not seem that he has. Zeihan thinks the U.S. is in the best position to weather the storm (metaphorically and literally speaking). Even if he is right about the last part, things won’t be nearly as sanguine as even he thinks – and that isn’t very sanguine to begin with. 

To set some parameters and be fair to Zeihan, I note up front that his timeframe is a mere 30 or so years beginning now and extending into the 2050s. The Earth is not going to be uninhabitable as soon as 2050. On the other hand, Zeihan thinks that some sort of new geopolitical equilibrium will emerge around that time. That contention is problematic because by then the impact of climate change will have become extreme (and costly) enough to prevent any such equilibrium from evolving and that is the point he misses. As bad as climate-related issues will be in 2050, they will continue to get worse for hundreds (possibly thousands) of years.

By 2050, at least, the Eastern seaboard and Gulf coasts of the U.S. will be fighting for their lives if there is any money left to fight with. Zeihan seems to think there will not be a lot of cheap (or any) financing by then; for example financing to prop up sea walls and harden port facilities. If he is right about that part, then Manhattan will lose its subway system, and the barrier islands protecting our Eastern and Gulf coasts will be gone; if not underwater entirely, then so battered as to be useless to anyone. New Orleans will almost certainly be underwater most of the time as will the southern half of Florida. Port facilities can be relocated to the new coasts at great expense, but cities are not so easily moved at any expense. 

The southern half of the U.S. will experience unlivable summer temperatures not for twenty or so days a year as they do now but sixty, ninety or more, as will most of India, Southern Europe, the Middle East, much of China, and so on. Survival will depend on air conditioning, of which there will be much less because there will be much less electricity (gas and oil goes away for lack of transport, solar and wind for lack of critical imported materials, leaving coal as the only option for most including the U.S. which will have mostly exhausted its shale resources). In the winter, the jet stream becomes unstable projecting itself deep into the American south bringing freezing arctic cold. Not such a big deal (except when people in Texas freeze to death), but those icy intrusions move east and come into contact with ever warmer air coming up from the Gulf. The result is an explosion of tornados and torrential rain. The massive midwestern floods (I note in both the summer and winter) of the last few years will be small potatoes by comparison.    

A California forest service scientist recently said: “in twenty years, every burnable acre in California will burn,” a timespan well within Zeihan’s forecast. Indeed, this applies to almost the entire western third of the country and extends into both Canada and Alaska, not to mention drought-plagued Mexico and Brazil.

Zeihan says we cannot predict what will happen climatologically at the zipcode level. True, but we can do better than he does, especially as concerns that part of the world surrounding the Himalayan mountains, the source of water for both greater India and Pakistan, but also China and every country of South East Asia. The Chinese are daming every major river coming out of Tibet and passing through China – which is most of them! At the moment, water (albeit less of it) still flows through the Mekong Delta. Soon enough (twenty-five years? Fifty?), it will not, and much of that sub-continent will starve. How long before Himalayan ice is gone or irrelevant?

China will have the last of that water, but when the Tibetan glaciers finally disappear, the Chinese dams will do little good, much as the Hoover dam in Nevada, which is now so depleted that its ability to generate electricity will soon be curtailed – so much for green hydropower. Southern California’s multi-billion dollar agricultural industry could now suck down every remaining drop of the Colorado River. So could Phoenix, and they are but two of the jurisdictions that have relied on that water for the last ninety years!

This is the big problem in Zeihan’s book; he ignores obvious intersections between climate and his major sub-topics. For example, there is a long chapter on the world’s present capacity to finance mega-projects of all kinds. He gives very good reasons why, in a more disconnected world, such financing, and so such projects, will vanish. But that means money for climate disaster mitigation (already unaffordable multi-billions a year for the U.S. alone) will be gone altogether. 

Even where we see disaster approaching, we will not be able to do anything about it! In my part of the world major highways and coastal infrastructure already begin to flood regularly in king tides – even in the absence of heavy rain. The region (a mere two or three hundred square miles in America’s still-richest State of 164,000 square miles) already cannot afford to address all the problems we see now! Above I noted that ports can be moved to new coastlines. But that takes a lot of money that won’t be available. How will America trade with even regional partners (or berth its mighty navy) with all her ports underwater?

That is the sum and substance of the book’s problem, in my opinion. For further reference, this review of “The Uninhabitable Earth” by Wallace-Wells is the center of my view on climate geopolitics. Have a look. 

The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan 2022

This latest by Peter Zeihan is something of a culmination of his last few books. The present interconnected world in which every independent State, even failed ones, can participate in a global market is coming to an end and what will replace it will look much more like 1850 in the “developed” world, and 1500 in much of the rest. 

Sustaining the world’s present connectedness rests essentially on three things: safe and cheap transport across the world’s oceans, energy for everything (including said transport), and a  population young enough to turn the economic cranks that make it all run. The first of these depends on the Americans who will soon find it too expensive to maintain the practice (and this especially in the face of headwinds put up by two powers otherwise the biggest beneficiaries of American protection of the sea lanes: Russia and China). If bulk transport becomes too expensive, energy supplies dry up. Not everywhere of course but enough places to disrupt every market on the planet. Demographically, most (but again not all) of the world is doomed to experience labor shortages and excessive costs for retirees in this decade.

Zeihan explores the intersection of transport, energy, economics, materials, demographics, technology, and agriculture. He tries to suggest who will be winners, losers, or fall in between in the great unwinding. Before the modern era of protected sea lanes, geography, where your country is on the globe, its climate, resources, and what it looked like, mountains, rivers, etc., made the biggest difference between the winners and losers. True global trade changed all that. It’s going to change back. I think his handling of all this material is superb (though many of the quips sprinkling the book fall flat). He does note that even at its most destructive, the sort of devolution he projects is not the worst that could happen if, for example, someone starts throwing nuclear weapons around. 

The shortcoming appears on the matter of climate change (one of the factors increasing the cost of everything and so corroding global interconnections) which Zeihan mentions here and there, but considers more specifically only with respect to agriculture. This is far from enough treatment. I will deal with this further in my blog, but here mention only one issue. Zeihan projects that the really bad stuff, the global unwinding, will begin now, go through its roughest patches by the 2030-40s, and in the 2050s will congeal into something new. Some stability will reemerge, at least in the better-off places. 

I think he is wrong about this last part because the climate situation (and he correctly notes many reasons why “green tech” will not save us) is not going to stabilize merely because a reduced human population comes to some new lower energy equilibrium in the 2050s. The climate is going to keep getting more destructive, and more inimical to human life across the entire globe for the next several (possibly more) thousand years!

Finally, I have a technical bone to pick with the publisher. This book is filled with tables and graphs impossible to read on a real Kindle. Yes, I can use a Kindle reader on my phone or laptop and examine the figures, but that is no excuse. There is a way to format embedded images so they can be expanded and read easily on a real Kindle. In this case, the publisher didn’t bother. The result, in the ebook, is less than optimum. 

Book Review: Water

This review is not on the blog because of dangling philosophical issues, but to add to a series. “The Uninhabitable Earth”, “The Geography of Risk”, and now “Water”, each in their way tell us (boldly or in hints) about what is about to befall the Earth in the next 20-50 years and beyond. 

Oddly, for me, this all began with Slavoj Zizek’s “The Courage of Hopelessness”. In commenting on that book I pointed out that economic exhaustion precipitated by climate change mitigation will collapse the present capitalist world order long before the left ever has a chance to make a substantial impact. I then stumbled on these other books, reviews and Amazon links all given above. 

Water by Steven Solomon (2011)

A long book methodically drilling down into an important subject. Of all Earth’s resources, air and water are the two most necessary to sustain life, and of the two only water exists in three phases, gas, liquid, and solid, on in and above the surface. There have been other books covering the history of water (particularly freshwater) use since antiquity. Solomon goes the extra mile and looks at water from more than the usual angles. Learning to sail the oceans is a part of the water story as are the world’s inter-continental canals (Suez and Panama) and oceanic choke-points (straights like Hormuz and Malacca) and also the story of the steam engine. He also notes that food is “virtual water”. Not only is water a consumable input in growing crops, but is also a component of the many steps needed to bring the crop to the table. 

Solomon begins with a review of the freshwater situation on Earth and then visits every historical civilization digging into their history of freshwater management. A general cycle is visible everywhere. A civilization arises when its region’s water resources (including bordering seas if any)  are successfully tapped to yield increased food, strategic trade or military advantage, or lower cost, usually all three in one mix or another. Successful water management results in population growth and territorial expansion until the population reaches the limits of its technology’s ability to maintain and expand its water management. Politics plays a role. Even where technology and knowledge exist, a society may become unwilling, politically, to do what is necessary to manage a degrading water system. As water management declines, so does the civilization, and this is so even where the needed water still exists. In the modern age, existing water, at least freshwater, is being increasingly used up or evaporating away as ancient glacial stores melt.

The real problem of course is not exactly water but population. Solomon notes but does not comment on this, rather treating it as an inevitable background to the whole story. On the one hand, an expanding population needs more water, but it also increasingly pollutes and otherwise abuses the freshwater still to be had.  

Having reviewed water history around the world all the way up to the end of the 20th Century, Solomon goes into the modern challenge. He revisits each of the world’s regions and summarizes their present and near future water challenges. Climate change is re-arranging the freshwater balance around the world. Some places become much drier, and others much wetter. Winter snows melt earlier in the season, and summer heat more quickly evaporates stored water. Mitigating water-related disasters, whether larger fires in dry places or bigger, longer-lasting floods in wetter ones, are consuming a larger percentage of the world’s resources. Technological and political success managing these changes is key to the survivability of each nation, and the world collectively. There is no guarantee of success and in fact, the present trajectory does not bode well for anyone.

Review: The Disunited Nations by Peter Zeihan

“Disunited Nations” is a forecast of the world’s geopolitical layout twenty to fifty years from now. The “global order” set up in 1946 (see review included below) is unwinding, but it is not unwound. Peter Zeihan doesn’t fix dates, but it is reasonable to suppose that, as he sees it, the complete unwinding will take another ten-to-fifteen years. Following that, it will be another fifteen-to-twenty-five more years for the dust to settle into some new version of normal. Forty years (to ~2060) and the geopolitical world will stand transformed. Alas Zeihan’s analysis, the status of nations in that future, implicitly takes climate to be a constant. He mentions “climate change” only once, doesn’t discuss it, and misses its implications for the same time-frame. 

“The Uninhabitable Earth” (2018 by David Wallace-Wells) makes climatological projections for roughly the same time-frame, twenty-five to fifty years from 2020. Wallace-Wells goes beyond that, but the near to medium-term climate future contains enough change to alter not merely the geopolitics of the world but the geography and geophysics of it! According to Wallace-Wells, a further two to three-degree centigrade rise in average temperature is now “baked into the system”. If we cease all industrial carbon output now, we will reach two degrees over the 1900 base (we are at one degree and change now) in thirty or so years, three degrees in seventy-five. But we are not “stopping all industrial carbon output now”, nor does it appear that we will even slow it appreciably over the next twenty-five years. As a result, we will hit two degrees in fifteen years and three degrees twenty or twenty-five years later, all of this well within Zeihan’s geopolitical time-frame.

The most direct climatological impact has to do with a weather-related concept called “wet-bulb temperature”, a measurement of the temperature if relative humidity was one-hundred percent. Human beings cannot survive the heat (in the absence of some mitigating technology) if bodies cannot sweat their way to cooling down. At 35C, you will die if the humidity is near one-hundred percent. At 45C, fifty-percent humidity is enough to kill you. A few dozen cities around the world reach lethal temperature and humidity levels on multiple days during their summers. In Wallace-Wells’ view, this condition will prevail over virtually all the tropical and much of the temperate Earth by 2075, possibly by 2050! In between now and then, the next five or ten years, the number of places and the number of days on which people (always the elderly and other vulnerable groups first) die because it is too hot will continue to expand. 

How much difference does a degree or two celsius make? In 2020, Phoenix had a record 50 days hitting 110F (44C), shattering the old record (33 days) set only 9 years earlier. The hottest it got was over 120F! When the climate hits 2C degrees warming, Phoenix will experience one-hundred or more days a year of such high temperatures, and on some days, temperatures will reach 130F (54C)! Phoenix is already pretty hot. In 2030 the outside will be very uncomfortable for a third of the year and, simply put, not survivable on the worst days. The city will require more electricity and water to cool buildings and sustain life. Electricity may, perhaps, be forthcoming. As for water, the Colorado river will by then be a fraction of the present volume (already below levels when the river’s physical connection to Phoenix was made). At three degrees celsius, no one will be able to afford to protect themselves from the heat in Phoenix! 

When does a city, even one well above sea level, become unlivable thanks to heat and humidity? Does it happen when the temperature exceeds lethal levels ten days a year, fifty, or a hundred? In Zeihan’s terms, some of the impacts may be perversely beneficial! Hot weather that kills mostly the elderly might help correct a nation’s demographic decline by rebalancing the age distribution! 

The people of Phoenix, and for that matter, much of the globe, will have no place to go. By 2075 coastlines the world over will be transformed; their megapolises, presently the locus of most economies, will be gone. The rough triangle between Houston TX, Mobile AL, and St. Louis MO, will be a permanent part of the Gulf of Mexico. Large-scale permanent “oceanification” will happen to low-lying places the world over. Bangladesh will be underwater, as will South Florida and a good deal of North-Western Europe.  Today’s productive farmlands in temperate zones will be too hot and too wet (the central U.S.) or too dry (California) to grow many of the crops produced in those regions today. In California, people might retreat to the mountains’ relative coolness, but those places are burning down! A leading wildland fire expert said that every burnable [wildland] acre in California would burn at least once in the next ten to twenty years!   

Zeihan projects a future based on fixed (geographic) and fluid but forecastable (demographics, present requirements for food and energy, resources) data. Like his data, some climate impacts (rising sea levels) are pretty much a sure thing, though exactly how fast this happens remains unknown. The physical geography of the world’s coastal plains (some extending inland hundreds of miles) will be very different. Food and the availability of freshwater will impact demographic trends. Zeihan makes it clear that the world of 2050 will not produce and transport as much food as it now does. He projects famine. Climate considerations suggest that famine will be global and not merely a regional problem. What will Indo-Pakistani populations do when all the Himalayan glaciers melt away, and the Indus and Ganges rivers are a tiny fraction of their present volume? In poorer food-producing (and especially water-scarce) regions, there will be mass starvation.   

Rising water will not cover the Earth. There will always be coasts somewhere. Rivers will empty into the new coastlines; new port opportunities will arise. But some of those places will merge into the regions where it is too hot or dry or wet to survive without expensive infrastructure. Will even a rich country like the United States be able to afford any of this? Longer than others, perhaps, but not by all that much. There is more woe to be had. Will cropland problems (heat, drought, floods, crop-destroying winds)  be as severe as the sea level problem twenty years from now, or will that take fifty years? Either way, the question becomes tangled with Zeihan’s projections for the relative worth of national economies, and American cropland will not alone be negatively affected by climate.   

The answers to how this works out in the near term, say the next ten to fifteen years, lie in the economic intersection between Zeihan’s analysis and climatological effects (see the link to the Wallace-Wells book, and also “The Geography of Risk” for other discussions of it). Coastal populations will fight rising waters; others will wrestle with drought, fire, or floods from storms. All will battle the rising temperature, and at some point, varying in each part of the world, it will become too expensive to do so. We cannot predict exactly when the cost of climate-mitigation will first exhaust a national economy (in the U.S., the barrier islands of the Eastern Seaboard, Florida, and the Gulf of Mexico), or when New York City begins abandoning large sections of itself.  Still, that time is but a few decades away at most. Bangladesh has less time than that! The bottom line is this: Zeihan projects a specific global distribution of wealth and resources fifty years from now. He projects massive refugee migrations because the “global order” that presently sustains many populations by trade will be gone. Thanks to climate change, that wealth (broadly and with possible partial-exceptions in places like Canada, Siberia, and the Nordic nations) will be one-tenth (the money [energy, resources] spent on early climate-mitigation efforts) and the refugee populations ten or a hundred-times what Zeihan projects. 

I haven’t the grasp of details I need to juggle Zeihan’s country-by-country analysis of the world after “the order” has collapsed plus the impact of climate change. I can make two generalizations with reasonable certainty. (1) While climate change will not alter the distribution of resources in the Earth’s crust, it will impact every other parameter Zeihan considers. (2) Everyone will come out much worse off than Zeihan predicts. I can only hope he will read this, and it will give him an idea for a follow-on book.

Dis-United Nations By Peter Zeihan (2020)

This book looks at the future of the Earth’s various nations and their relations over roughly the next 50-75 years. If you read other authors on international relations, you will recognize many of the same notes struck. But Zeihan is less interested in the relations between governments compared to that between physical countries (and regions) situated in specific geopolitical settings, with their particular demographics and economic requirements both on the selling side (outputs), and resources (inputs) needed to produce goods and feed its population. 

Zeihan opens in 1946 when the U.S. economy was half the world’s economy. The way Zeihan sees it, unlike the empires of the past whose conquests were mostly military, the U.S. offered the world a bribe. First, the U.S. would patrol the seas and guarantee freedom of navigation everywhere to all. Second, the U.S. would fight and bleed for any ally when necessary. Third, the U.S. would open its markets to its partners even if they partly protected their own. Fourth, the U.S. would provide financial liquidity to grease all the wheels and make this work. 

This four-part bribe has worked for the most part to grow the economy of the planet, feed expanding populations, and in general, keep any tendency to militaristic conquest to a minimum. The trade relationships and supply chains developed over the last half of the 20th Century, and the first decades of the 21st, are a testimony to its success. It hasn’t been perfect. Not everyone wanted to be on board. But as it happened, the great majority of the world’s economies did get on board (even China since 1972) and have benefitted, over-all (not without hiccups) as a result.

The problem is, the bribe has run its course. The U.S. economy is now about twenty-five percent of the world economy, not half. The five-hundred-fifty ship navy the U.S. had in 1946 is now down to about three-hundred ships, and one-hundred of those dedicated to supporting nine super-carriers. The U.S. can no longer afford to be the guarantor of the sea lanes, nor be an open market to any import. The same is becoming true of standing military commitments around the world. The American people are tired of bleeding, or the threat of bleeding, for others whose interests are not often aligned with our own, and there are not enough dollars to float all economic boats. 

Not only is the “great order” unwinding, but scatter-shot American foreign policy, a policy without any clear direction, is helping dissolve it even faster than it otherwise needs to go (not that other governments are much help). The question is, what happens when all of those U.S. guarantees are gone (the U.S. is, for now, still patrolling the seas). That future is what this book is about. 

Zeihan takes us on a tour of the world by country and region, describing what each will experience when the order is gone. His dominant considerations revolve around internal geography, location in the world, and population demographics over the next fifty years. The parents of that generation, the youth of fifty-years from now, already born. The economics of resources come next. What does a country (or region) produce? What inputs does it need to make whatever it is? How does it feed its population, where do its energy and materials come from, and so on? As it turns out, by Zeihan’s analysis some nations and regions will do better than others. Most end up very badly, and the mix won’t be what you expect. To be clear about one thing though, “better” and “worse” are relative terms as he makes clear at the end of his analysis. No one will be as well off in absolute terms as they are right now!

As refreshing and unexpected as it is, Zeihan’s analysis has a blind spot. It is strange that except in the context of Japan, China, and the Middle East, he never focuses on India and the Indo-Pakistani region. Not sure how he missed that one, but he did. Meanwhile, his projections have a broader problem. He mentions climate change literally one time and says nothing about it. The impact of climate change is noticeable even now, and within the fifty-plus-year timespan covered in the book climatic effects will be much more dramatic. The book Zeihan should factor into his analysis is not geopolitical but geophysical: “The Uninhabitable Earth” (2018 by David Wallace-Wells). Nothing in that book augers against any of Zeihan’s analysis except to make the outcomes for everyone even worse than his broad brush paints them. I will address this intersection in my blog.    

Review: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

Some months ago I reviewed Slavoj Zizek’s “The Courage of Hopelessness”. I suggested that Zizek’s political projections would have little chance of materializing because economic collapse precipitated by climate mitigation efforts in the rich world would overwhelm everything else in but a few short decades. Next I came across G. Gaul’s “Geography of Risk” which, though focusing on storms and sea-level effects on the U.S. East and Gulf coasts, supported my prediction. Now this, “The Uninhabitable Earth” (review & link below), comes along amplifying everything in the Gaul book and laying down an even more frightening picture not only about where present trends are taking us, but the almost certain inevitability of vast tracts of the equatorial and presently-temperate Earth becoming uninhabitable by 2100.

Most of the cascades described by Wallace-Wells have already been triggered and will not stop (though they would slow a bit) even if we ceased all industry-related atmospheric carbon production tomorrow, something that is obviously not going to happen. Technology (as he points out) is not going to save us this time. We do know how to pull carbon out of the air yes, but as Wallace-Wells shows, we cannot afford to deploy enough of it fast enough to block a two to three degree (celsius) rise in average global temperatures over the next 75 years.

Wallace-Wells is (non-optimistically) hopeful that humanity will wake up in time to stop carbon output at least soon enough to halt future warming at three degrees. In fact I believe human industrial carbon output (most of it, globally) will cease in another ten or twenty years, roughly when we are close to two degrees of warming (as of 2018 we were at one degree and some change with atmospheric carbon rising faster now, year on year, than it has ever before). But it won’t stop because humans wake up and do something about the problem. It will stop because all of the economies of the world will have collapsed. Over a few decades, people will starve (or die from disease and war) in such vast numbers that few will be left to put any substantial carbon into the atmosphere more than the cooking fires that could be found dotting the Earth ten thousand years ago. The human population will be about where it was ten thousand years ago. That might be by 2100, likely sooner than that.

Still all of the cascades, devastating forest fires and melting permafrost will yet be releasing billions of tons of carbon even in the absence of human industry, and of course ocean levels will continue to rise utterly changing the geography of the world. By 2200 there will be very few places on Earth where food can be grown or hunted and the human race may be reduced to levels barely able to avoid extinction, if even that. If this isn’t frightening enough, the news gets worse from here. Even if the temperature rise tops out at three or four degrees, the planet will not again return to a cooler, human-comfortable climate regime, for thousands, possibly tens-of-thousands, of years!

Here is another book on the subject reinforcing the idea that we are in bigger trouble than we think: “Water” by Steven Solomon, 2011

Uninhabitable Earth  by David Wallace-Wells 2018

This book opens with what, for me, was a surprise. I know that carbon emissions have, world-wide, steadily increased even since the first international “climate mitigation agreements” of thirty years ago. What I did not know is that since 1990, the world, collectively, has pumped twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as it did in the thirty years from 1960 to 1990. There are other surprises: Bitcoin anyone? Sure there’s some electricity involved but how much carbon could that be? It turns out to be about as much, per year, as one million international jet flights! Our own industrial activity is only a part (albeit still a large part) of the problem now. Other, cascading effects, are now adding their impact. Global wild-fires now consume, on average, ten times as much forest every year as they did thirty years ago. That’s a lot of extra carbon. Even worse, the world’s permafrost is beginning to melt releasing carbon in the form of methane which, depending on whether we are speaking of low or high altitude, has between four and eighty times the warming effect of carbon dioxide.

The title of the book is prescient. Think of the climatologically worst environments on the Earth today (having warmed a bit more than one degree Celsius since the beginning of the industrial revolution in 1800. We are on track to hit two degrees by 2050 or so), perhaps the middle of the Sahara, Arizona in the summer, or someplace where it never stops being hot and raining. These are today’s most inhospitable climate environments. By 2100, that sort of place will be among the best and most livable we have on Earth. Large parts of our world will be largely and literally uninhabitable, places where humans die because their bodies cannot cool themselves by sweating unless immersed in cool water, or because there is no water the glaciers being gone, and this at only three degrees of warming (2100).

The first third of the book is about various cascades, most already triggered, some on the verge. Effects of warming add up both by directly making things worse and by degrading the planet’s ability to absorb carbon and mitigate the other effects. Wallace’s picture here is very dire. In the rest of the book, Wallace deals with the economic, political, social, and psychological future. Here I do not think he is dire enough. He speaks of refugees in the tens of millions (try hundreds of millions), extremist movements on both the right and left, of wars, pandemics, crop failures, of collapsing economies unable to sustain the cost of climate mitigation, and that only the economies that can afford any mitigation to begin with. The rest will have since joined the refugees. Wallace touches on all of this, but I do not think he fully appreciates how quickly and thoroughly human beings can (and will) turn on one another long before this all becomes as bad as it’s going to get!

Technology will not save us. Wallace covers that too. We can desalinate water and even pull carbon out of the air. There will never be enough of either that the world can afford. Besides, both are energy-intensive processes, and even if powered with renewable energy, that is not easy to do as concerns the long chain of activities needed to build and maintain that technology. Solar and wind power, for that matter almost all modern electronics, require elements called “rare earths”.  Rare-Earth mining is a carbon-intensive process.

In the end, Wallace is hopeful, though not optimistic, that the global polity will wake up and de-carbonize the global economy, not in time to halt two to three degrees of warming, it is already too late for that, but in time to prevent it going to four degrees or more. I think he is over-optimistic here too. It is simply not possible, politically, and this for economic reasons, for soon-to-be nine-billion humans to de-carbonize as quickly as needed to hold the line at two to three degrees. What will force the race to de-carbonize will be economic collapse, leading to socio-political collapse, leading to mass death (over some decades) from starvation, disease, or war. I think Wallace sees this grim possibility. He hopes it isn’t inevitable.

This a good and timely book though I doubt it will have much effect on the carbon trajectory of our so-called civilization. It is good to see the ground covered as much as Wallace covers it. He does a good job of showing how the climatological and the political go together (alas perversely). I think he fails to draw some obvious conclusions from his own well-made points. Perhaps it’s for the better. He would be accused of doom saying. I am a doomsayer! Feel free to accuse me! Meanwhile, the book is frightening enough as it is!

Review: The Geography of Risk by G. Gaul

This well written book hasn’t any philosophical implications on which to comment. I put this here in my rapidly expanding “book review” subsection because of its relevance to my commentary on Slavoj Zizek’s “The Courage of Hopelessness”. My commentary on the Zizek book ended up being mostly about climate change and ecological disaster, something that Zizek mentions but doesn’t much talk about. My point in that commentary was that the re-making of the world’s social, political, and economic orders that are the focus of Zizek’s book (many of his books in fact) will be made mostly irrelevant thanks to the utter destruction of the present global order beginning with its economics.

That’s what I said about Zizek. Specifically, with regard to the United States I said that climate change would soon bankrupt it, and that long before the impact of the twin phenomena (climate change and [partial] ecological collapse) was fully felt. Now a couple weeks after writing that commentary, along comes this book which, while focused on a singular aspect of the problem (the U.S. East and Gulf coasts), illustrates and puts numbers to my claims.

The Geography of Risk by Gilbert Gaul (2019)

Only two weeks ago I wrote a blog essay commenting on another book I recently reviewed (Slavoj Zizek’s “The Courage of Hopelessness”). In my commentary I pointed out that the on-rushing phenomena of climate change will shortly (next few decades) overwhelm the social, political, and financial capacity of any national or even supra-national organization. I accused Zizek of ignoring “the elephant in the room”. Only a few days after that essay (see my Amazon profile for blog address) this book by Gilbert Gaul appeared on my radar. Its title alone seemed a validation of my claims. I was not disappointed, though as it turns out, the focus of the book is geographically very narrow.

Dr. Gaul is an expert in the economics, geography, and risk of coastal and near-coastal communities of the United States Eastern and Gulf coasts. That, specifically is what this book is about. He is easy to read, gives us all the important numbers, but isn’t dry. He tells the story historically through the eyes of many involved: developers and politicians one one side, scientists and some of the engineers tasked with fixing a hopeless situation on the other.

Why this region? First, the U.S. Eastern seaboard, especially from New Jersey to southern Florida, and then throughout the Gulf of Mexico is riddled with barrier islands made mostly of sand, and then behind these barriers lots of shallow bays, estuaries, and low-lying land sometimes extending inland hundreds of miles. Second, all of this coast is among the world’s great hurricane and “rain bomb” bowling alleys. Third that same coast, all those barrier islands, have evolved demographically from a few fishing villages in the 1940s through inexpensive (once middle class) small summer homes costing a few thousand dollars, to multi-million dollar mansions. Fourth, back in the 1950’s the Federal Government covered 10% or 20% of the cost to rebuild thousand dollar homes when storms destroyed them, today the government covers 90% of the cost to replace a like number of million-dollar homes!

The net result of all this is that the taxpayers of all States, not just the coastal states affected, were, 70 years ago, on the hook for a few millions of Federal dollars spent on this process. Today, the number is in the hundreds of billions! As it turns out, according to Gaul, the cost to U.S. taxpayers to repair hurricane and rain damage to places that are destroyed by these weather phenomena every decade or so (sometimes more) is higher than damage from all other disasters (inland floods, fires, earthquakes) combined and by a big margin.

How this all came to be is much the focus of this book. In the end the answer is politics and economics. Take a barren piece of sand and put a few homes on it. Soon you begin to need services, sewers, roads, traffic control, bridges, banks, and so on. There come to be small towns with mayors, police, fire fighters, contractors (building and repairing homes), bankers, and so on. These are jobs paid for by property taxes. When the properties are destroyed (repeatedly) the tax base disappears and all these jobs are threatened. The solution is always to build back as quickly as possible and to make up for the temporary losses faster, to build more and bigger. As all of this re-construction occurred, the homeowners themselves could afford a smaller and smaller percentage of it all. To save the jobs (and ever larger community tax bases) Federal tax payers assumed a larger percentage of the replacement cost until today, this often comes out to more than 80% of costs to rebuild homes of millionaires and 100% of the ever growing network of roads, flood control projects (which never survive more than one next storm), bridges, sewers, and so on.

Of course all along these decades there were individuals in and out of government who pointed out that this cycle was absurd and would eventually become un-affordable not to mention physically unsustainable as the islands became smaller (erosion) and bays and wetlands were filled in to make yet more homes (and roads), further increase the tax base, and in consequence make it more difficult for high water to drain exacerbating the problem. The solution of course is to stop the building, abandon the islands back to small fishing villages, and let the waters do what they will. But repeatedly re-building small homes and a few services back on line meant jobs and now re-building big homes and greatly expanded services means even more jobs and trying to protect those towns (a hopeless endeavor) is always wasted work (Gaul gets into some of the crazy numbers). But millions of jobs are now invested in the continued functioning of those economies! The cycle goes on!

All of this and I haven’t even mentioned climate change. The economics and politics of this process is the focus of Gaul’s book, but he doesn’t ignore this. The bottom line here is that it would be bad enough to be loading American tax payers more and more economic risk as the economies of these storm-prone places get larger. Even if the storms and sea levels stayed constant the economic burden on the American taxpayer is already onerous and growing. Climate change will only make this worse. Gaul’s focus is the American East and South coasts whose risk grows disproportionately because of its exposure to more frequent, bigger storms and sea level rise. But he is well aware also that interior climate-related disasters, fires and floods, will grow in severity and so cost.

In my blog commentary mentioned above I said that this problem generally, this growth in the cost of disasters, would, in another decade or two, bankrupt the United States. Gaul’s book, though narrowly focused, is an argument for my claim.