Tag: disease

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: 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!