It really feels like the apocalypse has begun, doesn’t it?

Everywhere there is some kind of nasty shit going down. Flood, fire, rough, hurricane. the list goes on and on.

Here in the GVRD, we are cut off from the rest of the province by severe flooding.

So we have had to start rationing. There’s signs up in the supermarkets telling you that you can only buy so much meat and dairy and such. Gas stations are telling people only to buy as much as they absolutely need.

Of course, the people on the other side are actually flooded and have things much worse. My heart goes out to them.

And it’s only going to get worse, folks. Much, much worse.

Because right now, we’re still burning through the slack inherent in the system. The surplus that it carries as a matter of course. We’ve been overproducing for a long time and right now, we are coasting on that fact.

But it’s going to run out. Sooner rather than later.

And then everything is going to start falling apart.

This time next year we will be nostalgic for Covid. We will look back at those days when all we had to do was wear masks and wash our hands to be safe and sigh. To imagine being so naïve and clueless to think that life would go on even remotely like it did before the food died and the Bad Times began.

Take a deep breath and soak it all in, folks.

Because these are the Before Times.

I tried to phone my GP’s office to make the followup appointment after my stent operation. I got a rather peremptory “all circuits busy”. Twice,

It’s coming for us all. Up until now. it’s been possible for the majority of people, especially in densely populated urban centers, to treat the mayhem like it’s just the regular sort of natural disaster.

You know, very bad, but not the sign of something worse to come.

But people are going to start figuring it out soon. The percentage of the population shaken out of their ordinary lives by environmental madness will grow and grow, and those people are going to be pretty goddamned pissed off and want answers.

Climate widows (and widowers) will start showing up on TV and YouTube making passionate, heartfelt cases for their lost loved ones. Climate change will stop being this subject of public procrastination and idle fucking platitudes and become the crisis we are dealing with RIGHT NOW.

But what the fuck are we going to do about it? Even if we ceased all greenhouse emissions right this instant we’d still have far too much CO2 in the atmosphere.

If we’re going to fight this and win, it will take a massive coordinated global effort, and I don’t see that happening without something radical changing politically.

The future looks grim. People living underground. A lot less freedom. A lot less choice.

A lot less people.

Enjoy this Golden Age while it lasts, folks.

Things might not be this good again for a very long time.

More after the break.

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What we can do about it

I have a few ideas.

1. Start moving underground or otherwise weatherproofing cities. We need to accept that what used to be natural disasters will become everyday weather and work hard to make our towns and cities weatherproof. That will involve things like much heavier construction in order to make things wind and rain resistant,. In some places shielding whole areas with massive windbreaks might be cost effective. We are also going to need to drastically expand our street drainage and storm sewer system. Snow removal will likely need an update too. Firefighting will also face new challenges – especially in the fighting of forest fires. In general, we should anticipate spending far more of our public money on safety for the next couple of decades.
2. Pooling our knowledge. Because no matter how wild a weather system is, there is somewhere in the world where it’s a regular thing and they know how to deal with it.. There needs to be a “best practices” approach where innovation is encouraged and the stuff that works gets passed on.
3. Put a price on carbon. Obviously, we need to take the excess CO2 out. Right now, there is no solution for this because captured carbon has no market value. The governments of the world can solve this by buying it. Establish a global market for captured carbon with a fixed rate and then let capitalism do the rest. The market can serve the people if we nudge it in the right direction.
4. Greater government regulation. I hate to say it but things will have to get less free. The margins of survival will get a lot thinner and that means that the creative chaos of a totally free market will be a luxury we can’t afford any more. There may well need to be a “necessities” economy run by world governments with fixed prices and no profit taken and a “luxuries” economy which is more like what we have in the world now.
5. One world government. Not as a fascist junta that overrides all national identity and sovereignty, but as a new top level of government. Kind of like the EU. We’ve gone from huts to villages to towns to cities to city-states to nations and now to the final layer before we go multiplanetary, global. It will be this layer that coordinates the global response to the climate crisis. And to do so, it will need a fair bit of power because it has to be able to tell nations to knock off all that polluting and make that stick. With war, if absolutely necessary.

Those are just a few ideas off the top of my head.

Maybe I should turn all this into science fiction. Could make for a pretty good setting.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. Always so much maybe.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.