Great article, right on target. And as someone who’s been shouting warnings from the rooftops, and chronicling the eco-evolution, for a few decades, I can only wonder if this will be the disaster that finally wakes US up🔥😳
Appears that the Uber-wealthy lives matter more than “We the Serfs”, which will most likely never change until our planet reclaims itself from the life forms that have trashed it!
Sooooo, here's the thing. The misinformed people in denial die faster and more often than the people paying attention. Normally this is a small effect, but... recent events, such as Covid, have made it a much larger effect.
I have been modeling how many years it will take before so many of the misinformed people in denial die that the people trying to do the right thing outnumber them and can take power. It's too long, obviously, but it's not THAT long, it'll happen within a decade or two
Technically true, but imagine the state of the world in 2 decades. Imagine how many people who pay attention are being forced to suffer. Mask bans are a great example. By law in NC now, you can be arrested for refusing to unmask. So we have to keep speaking up, for our right to pay attention.
We absolutely have to keep speaking up and fighting. Mask bans are unenforceable and we can make them unenforceable, especially as the people who are charged with enforcing them get sick and die of preventable diseases.
It just seems difficult to win the fight because we're currently a minority. There will come a point when we have the numbers to win.
The thing is, Earth is not personal. Many people who are (or were) informed and aware are being impacted by these extreme events. I know some of them, perhaps you do too. Population may be impacted, but Earth does not care what our politics are. If we are in the deluge, we are swept away.
Well I’ve already invested 2M trying to educate and engage the public—doing some 5,000 interviews with solutionaries over 27 years—so any day now there should be an ROI.
I applaud you for your effort. Like Jessica (but without her readership numbers unfortunately) I have spent the last three years writing and warning about the dangers we face. I intend to keep going. I view it as a responsibility. So many threats now from climate change, species extinction, trending fascism, the scale of disasters that ramp up with every tenth of a degree, and the fantasy that life will go on without societal change as oil dwindles and limits our ability to build a renewable economy. https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/the-end-of-oil
While I do agree that these are issues that no one is addressing, I think we need to view the ideological reasons that nothing is being done. This is a liberal capitalist hellscape we have created, and we need to move away from capitalism to find any solutions. People like Matt Taibi say things like "we'll figure it out" because that is the point of neoliberal doctrine. Their belief is that The Market will solve the problems created by The Market. Market logic and consumer culture both dictate that tech will somehow save us and the only thing necessary is to buy our way out of the problem. As part of breaking ourselves out of the cycle of never acknowledging the problems we are seeing (and by "ourselves" and "we" I mean society at large) we must also break ourselves of the thinking that brought us to this point, otherwise we will simply recreate the issues facing us. It's us or capitalism now, and we need to start facing that. I think we should be more clear about that as well, and talk about it every time we have these discussions.
It definitely reads like it and is why I enjoy your writing. I merely think it needs to be made more explicit. Perhaps it's me but the comments I read sometimes don't always seem like the dots have quite connected
Just more and more signs of the collapse of the U.S. empire. The government is more concerned about their unipolar hegemony than taking care of the domestic issues that they face. The U.S. is facing another twist in its history and as more and more people get fed up with seeing all of their money going to other countries for nothing (in their viewpoint), with nothing being done to help them out when weather disasters hit, there will be more and more anger and the U.S. may see another uprising like they had during the Nixon presidency. January 6. 2021 will be a garden party in comparison.
No lives matter in America. I think that middle class white people will see that they are no different than the survivors of hurricane Katrina.
No lives matter in America.
Why would any American expect help after a natural disaster? Didn’t they see what happened in New Orleans? Didn’t they see over 1,250,000 Americans die, including thousands of children, from a virus? People are still dying from the effects of the virus, and will continue to, forever.
Everyone who has been harmed by Helene needs to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. That’s the “American way. “
Thank you for continuing to warn. So many planetary boundaries have been crossed and tipping points surpassed. The mainstream media will never acknowledge with the urgency needed. Now I'm going to buy some cool stuff the CNN website thinks I should get. It's all farce.
Funny the libs love screaming about how with Project 2025 government agencies like FEMA won’t exist. And that would be different than now how?
We’re supposed to believe Biden isn’t for Project 2025 when DeJoy is still running the post office, Wray is still running the FBI and FEMA can’t pay for or do anything for anyone?
Do you honestly think one man in less than four years can fix EVERYTHING we’ve fucked up through many far-right presidencies — the ones who lost the popular vote? Obama tried but the fascists openly fought everything he tried to do.
I've read so many US citizens who have no idea how our country's governance apparatus works. People seem to think the president is more like a monarch, and have no basic idea as to the separation of powers between the states and federal government. Though they usually have some idea as to the separation of powers at the federal level, they are often unaware that agencies such as the Federal Reserve, or the Post office, are governed by congressional statute, not at the whim of the president.
THIS is how NeoLiberals control and divide us! Like the neighboring communities are doing in South Carolina, you should be doing. Fuck the dividers and interior unite to HELP each other, not fight. That will come soon enough. The Uniparty thought dividing us would get them elected, but it's more likely to get them guillotined and should. The only reason we should engage in fighting is this Damaging Neoliberal government and they're Oligarchical masters. That's who the enemy is! It's not each other as the CIA, FBI and ALL the Greedy Grifting Expensive government alphabet agencies. We live in a constant Information War that the Neoliberals are waging on us. "Keep them at each other's throats and we can make away with all the wealth of this country while they're fighting. LOL!" Says Senator Graham and Senator Blumenthal to the rest of Congress and the Pentagon and the SCOTUS and the Administration (no matter which letter is in front of their name). I wouldn't put it past them to give up smearing Jill Stein and allow her into the Presidency for her to take the blame for their evil deeds.
Thank you for pointing out that our tax dollars are being spent on weapons and fossil fuels, and anyone complaining about that is a terrorist. My own daughter, who is devoting her life to climate resiliency for a million people in a land that will soon be uninhabitable, shames me for complaining about a boil water order when people in Buncombe County have no water at all. Our drinking water is downstream from an explosives plant and open burn pits, spewing heavy metals into the air, water, and soil on an ordinary day, but after Helene, the river crested at 27 feet above flood stage. What do you think is in the water now? No offense to my daughter, but I'll take my chances with filtered rain, and send as much cash as I can to people in harm's way.
My take-away: "Our politicians are funding war while abdicating their most basic responsibilities to help their own citizens during times of chronic crisis, with millions of people now struggling without food, water, fuel, or shelter. It is a vast understatement to call this reckless and irresponsible."
People don't matter! MIMAC:
Military
Industrial, Media,
Academic
Complex is running things, not the people of the USA...
I feel as safe as it’s possible to be in central Illinois. I see people running to buy houses in really vulnerable areas and I wonder if they’ve really thought it through.
Thank you for yet another eye-opening piece of writing, Jessica.
If it's of any interest to you, I'm curious to hear your perspective on the mid- to long-term impact on silicon wafer refining (i.e. modern computing) as per zerohedge:
...and actually this is a common feature. There are relatively few things which most humans use which are just going to become unavailable.
But a LOT of things are going to become MORE EXPENSIVE. Standard of living drop is inevitable because we're paying the "disaster overhead tax" with everything.
Yeah. I am familiar with overshoot and collapse - I'm painfully aware of diminishing eroei and compounding predicaments coming together to force prices upward and living standards downward. Just fascinating to follow the specifics sometimes
I spent a couple days this week looking for people in Asheville that other people couldn't get in touch with. Fortunately the ones I found were OK, they had no power, phone or internet and hadn't run out of food or water yet, or were being fed by an organization or church. We were to find out if they were OK or if they needed emergency services, urgent medications, which pharmacies were open, where to go for food or water. A non-profit organized the searches and they'd give you a list of people in a zip code to track down, and then you'd return to them by 5 p.m. with your results, so they could let the loved ones know. They had a short orientation, and said, you might find a dead body. You had to have a buddy, we only ran into one loose threatening looking dog (pit bull), and fortunately the owner was able to hold onto her etc. while we walked the rest of the way up to her neighbor's who is 90 and lives alone. I had my dog spray in my pocket and then hand once I saw and heard the dog, and a sturdy walking stick in my other hand. If anybody here is going to chastise me for being ready to protect myself from a potentially vicious dog, please don't. The first day we were only allowed to try to call or text the out of touch ones' phone numbers, before trying to find them if possible, which they recommended in case they were able to tell us they were OK by phone or text, and didn't need anything, and, of course, nobody answered the phone, and the second day we were allowed to call the searching ones' phone numbers as well, to ask them if they had already heard from their person or people, which sometimes they had, and saved us from driving around finding their house so we could have more time to look for other people. This type of weather event will happen where I live, in the mountains southwest of Asheville, probably sometime soon, all it takes is a lot of rain in a short amount of time. In my town a deputy was swept away in his pickup truck and died, and we "only" got 9 inches of rain instead of 20 plus inches. There were some high water rescues here too. The next town over from us in one direction, at a higher elevation, has no way in or out, and a lot of rich people live there, so now some people in my town don't have income because mostly they work over there as a plumber or cleaning houses or painting houses. I learned the fire department runs out of rubber boots and has to ask the community or churches or whoever to get them some more. That a hospital could have no food for patients or staff for days, and then not respond to requests from the media to talk about it. (HCA, owner of the Mission Hospital in Asheville who could probably afford for a fleet of helicopters to bring some food within 5 minutes of the storm ending to their helipad if they can communicate with anybody somehow) That yellow jackets' nests get too much water in them and then the ones who are left might swarm, and next time I'm going to carry (if I'm fortunate enough to help) benadryl to hand out to the linemen I see working on the power lines to take in case they get stung. That you can drive over downed power lines IF they can't touch anything but your vehicle's tires, and never the roof especially, and never if there is an overhanging tree touching the line that could also possibly touch your vehicle. That the ATMs won't work (don't know why anybody was surprised about that, but a lot of people were), that grocery stores would only take cash, or no cash back, at least at first, that one of the grocery store chains' main hub would be flooded and screw up all the others in that chain, that the banks would run out of cash very quickly, that there would be no bananas or eggs almost immediately, that so many people would give so much of their time and money so quickly and selflessly, especially but not only churches, but they were the best organized and first ones making a dent with the food and the water, that there would be so much looting, and that people would think our government would actually help them rebuild. I didn't like that they kept saying on the news that "this is a once in 100 years or once in a generation storm". I don't believe that. I get that they need people to not be freaking out about the next one while they're suffering from this one, but they could just not say that and leave it at that. I hope maybe something I wrote here can help somebody prepare. When it happens here I know more what to expect and some things to do that I hadn't thought of.
Great article, right on target. And as someone who’s been shouting warnings from the rooftops, and chronicling the eco-evolution, for a few decades, I can only wonder if this will be the disaster that finally wakes US up🔥😳
It should, but I think we've crossed into a new era.
Nope. People are too misinformed by our politicians and psychopaths. It’s going to be bread and circuses until everything is gone. Soon.
Correct. There will never be a wake up.
Katrina.
Sandy.
Sarscov2.
The Tubbs Fire.
The Paradise Fire.
No lives matter in America. Not only Black lives. White lives don’t matter. The lives of children don’t matter.
No lives matter.
Appears that the Uber-wealthy lives matter more than “We the Serfs”, which will most likely never change until our planet reclaims itself from the life forms that have trashed it!
Thanks for saving me the time by writing that, Patrick
Sooooo, here's the thing. The misinformed people in denial die faster and more often than the people paying attention. Normally this is a small effect, but... recent events, such as Covid, have made it a much larger effect.
I have been modeling how many years it will take before so many of the misinformed people in denial die that the people trying to do the right thing outnumber them and can take power. It's too long, obviously, but it's not THAT long, it'll happen within a decade or two
Technically true, but imagine the state of the world in 2 decades. Imagine how many people who pay attention are being forced to suffer. Mask bans are a great example. By law in NC now, you can be arrested for refusing to unmask. So we have to keep speaking up, for our right to pay attention.
We absolutely have to keep speaking up and fighting. Mask bans are unenforceable and we can make them unenforceable, especially as the people who are charged with enforcing them get sick and die of preventable diseases.
It just seems difficult to win the fight because we're currently a minority. There will come a point when we have the numbers to win.
Hmm not sure about that, Neroden. Ashville is said to be a place climate aware people saw as a refuge
The thing is, Earth is not personal. Many people who are (or were) informed and aware are being impacted by these extreme events. I know some of them, perhaps you do too. Population may be impacted, but Earth does not care what our politics are. If we are in the deluge, we are swept away.
I wouldn't put money on that, Betsy, sorry.
Well I’ve already invested 2M trying to educate and engage the public—doing some 5,000 interviews with solutionaries over 27 years—so any day now there should be an ROI.
I applaud you for your effort. Like Jessica (but without her readership numbers unfortunately) I have spent the last three years writing and warning about the dangers we face. I intend to keep going. I view it as a responsibility. So many threats now from climate change, species extinction, trending fascism, the scale of disasters that ramp up with every tenth of a degree, and the fantasy that life will go on without societal change as oil dwindles and limits our ability to build a renewable economy. https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/the-end-of-oil
It will not
“Most people will run from the truth about this as if their sanity depends on it” - C. ingram in Facing Extinction
While I do agree that these are issues that no one is addressing, I think we need to view the ideological reasons that nothing is being done. This is a liberal capitalist hellscape we have created, and we need to move away from capitalism to find any solutions. People like Matt Taibi say things like "we'll figure it out" because that is the point of neoliberal doctrine. Their belief is that The Market will solve the problems created by The Market. Market logic and consumer culture both dictate that tech will somehow save us and the only thing necessary is to buy our way out of the problem. As part of breaking ourselves out of the cycle of never acknowledging the problems we are seeing (and by "ourselves" and "we" I mean society at large) we must also break ourselves of the thinking that brought us to this point, otherwise we will simply recreate the issues facing us. It's us or capitalism now, and we need to start facing that. I think we should be more clear about that as well, and talk about it every time we have these discussions.
The bankrupt ideology of neoliberal capitalism is the burning backdrop behind every single thing I write.
It definitely reads like it and is why I enjoy your writing. I merely think it needs to be made more explicit. Perhaps it's me but the comments I read sometimes don't always seem like the dots have quite connected
Yes, yes, yes...!!!!
Just more and more signs of the collapse of the U.S. empire. The government is more concerned about their unipolar hegemony than taking care of the domestic issues that they face. The U.S. is facing another twist in its history and as more and more people get fed up with seeing all of their money going to other countries for nothing (in their viewpoint), with nothing being done to help them out when weather disasters hit, there will be more and more anger and the U.S. may see another uprising like they had during the Nixon presidency. January 6. 2021 will be a garden party in comparison.
Isn't it time for a national civil legal action against all the fossil energy producers for the costs of climate change?
Helene will affect us all. Even those of us in Minnesota.
“Nation's largest supplier of IV solutions temporarily closes amid Helene”
No IV solutions.
People will die when we run out of IV solutions.
Our medical supply infrastructure is made where it is cheapest. No unions. Puerto Rico. Costa Rica. Vietnam.
Get ready people
No lives matter in America. I think that middle class white people will see that they are no different than the survivors of hurricane Katrina.
No lives matter in America.
Why would any American expect help after a natural disaster? Didn’t they see what happened in New Orleans? Didn’t they see over 1,250,000 Americans die, including thousands of children, from a virus? People are still dying from the effects of the virus, and will continue to, forever.
Everyone who has been harmed by Helene needs to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. That’s the “American way. “
Many Americans are about to be treated like the 1,200,000,000 people in the world without access to electricity.
Why do we think we are entitled to our cushy lives? And the people living in Sudan, are not?
Thank you for continuing to warn. So many planetary boundaries have been crossed and tipping points surpassed. The mainstream media will never acknowledge with the urgency needed. Now I'm going to buy some cool stuff the CNN website thinks I should get. It's all farce.
Funny the libs love screaming about how with Project 2025 government agencies like FEMA won’t exist. And that would be different than now how?
We’re supposed to believe Biden isn’t for Project 2025 when DeJoy is still running the post office, Wray is still running the FBI and FEMA can’t pay for or do anything for anyone?
Do you honestly think one man in less than four years can fix EVERYTHING we’ve fucked up through many far-right presidencies — the ones who lost the popular vote? Obama tried but the fascists openly fought everything he tried to do.
He could have tried. DeJoy could have been removed within a year, he just didn't really bother
The president doesn't fire the Postmaster General. It's up to the Board of Governors.
The current Board of Governors is heavily republican appointed, although Biden just appointed a new member.
It's not as simple as Biden firing DeJoy. Wish it were.
I've read so many US citizens who have no idea how our country's governance apparatus works. People seem to think the president is more like a monarch, and have no basic idea as to the separation of powers between the states and federal government. Though they usually have some idea as to the separation of powers at the federal level, they are often unaware that agencies such as the Federal Reserve, or the Post office, are governed by congressional statute, not at the whim of the president.
THIS is how NeoLiberals control and divide us! Like the neighboring communities are doing in South Carolina, you should be doing. Fuck the dividers and interior unite to HELP each other, not fight. That will come soon enough. The Uniparty thought dividing us would get them elected, but it's more likely to get them guillotined and should. The only reason we should engage in fighting is this Damaging Neoliberal government and they're Oligarchical masters. That's who the enemy is! It's not each other as the CIA, FBI and ALL the Greedy Grifting Expensive government alphabet agencies. We live in a constant Information War that the Neoliberals are waging on us. "Keep them at each other's throats and we can make away with all the wealth of this country while they're fighting. LOL!" Says Senator Graham and Senator Blumenthal to the rest of Congress and the Pentagon and the SCOTUS and the Administration (no matter which letter is in front of their name). I wouldn't put it past them to give up smearing Jill Stein and allow her into the Presidency for her to take the blame for their evil deeds.
Harris certainly isnt for Project 2025. Start there.
Thank you for pointing out that our tax dollars are being spent on weapons and fossil fuels, and anyone complaining about that is a terrorist. My own daughter, who is devoting her life to climate resiliency for a million people in a land that will soon be uninhabitable, shames me for complaining about a boil water order when people in Buncombe County have no water at all. Our drinking water is downstream from an explosives plant and open burn pits, spewing heavy metals into the air, water, and soil on an ordinary day, but after Helene, the river crested at 27 feet above flood stage. What do you think is in the water now? No offense to my daughter, but I'll take my chances with filtered rain, and send as much cash as I can to people in harm's way.
The people of the Navajo nation have never had running water. That’s how much the feds care about Americans
My take-away: "Our politicians are funding war while abdicating their most basic responsibilities to help their own citizens during times of chronic crisis, with millions of people now struggling without food, water, fuel, or shelter. It is a vast understatement to call this reckless and irresponsible."
People don't matter! MIMAC:
Military
Industrial, Media,
Academic
Complex is running things, not the people of the USA...
"War is a Racket"
https://youtu.be/26O-2SVcrw0?si=vajh2iMN7WKGj6OA
I feel as safe as it’s possible to be in central Illinois. I see people running to buy houses in really vulnerable areas and I wonder if they’ve really thought it through.
guaranteed they have not
Thank you for yet another eye-opening piece of writing, Jessica.
If it's of any interest to you, I'm curious to hear your perspective on the mid- to long-term impact on silicon wafer refining (i.e. modern computing) as per zerohedge:
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/modern-economy-rests-single-road-north-carolina-where-hurricane-collapsed-bridges
It's not the sole source, it's used for making crucibles which last for 6+ months and are recyclable. It just makes things more expensive
...and actually this is a common feature. There are relatively few things which most humans use which are just going to become unavailable.
But a LOT of things are going to become MORE EXPENSIVE. Standard of living drop is inevitable because we're paying the "disaster overhead tax" with everything.
Yeah. I am familiar with overshoot and collapse - I'm painfully aware of diminishing eroei and compounding predicaments coming together to force prices upward and living standards downward. Just fascinating to follow the specifics sometimes
I spent a couple days this week looking for people in Asheville that other people couldn't get in touch with. Fortunately the ones I found were OK, they had no power, phone or internet and hadn't run out of food or water yet, or were being fed by an organization or church. We were to find out if they were OK or if they needed emergency services, urgent medications, which pharmacies were open, where to go for food or water. A non-profit organized the searches and they'd give you a list of people in a zip code to track down, and then you'd return to them by 5 p.m. with your results, so they could let the loved ones know. They had a short orientation, and said, you might find a dead body. You had to have a buddy, we only ran into one loose threatening looking dog (pit bull), and fortunately the owner was able to hold onto her etc. while we walked the rest of the way up to her neighbor's who is 90 and lives alone. I had my dog spray in my pocket and then hand once I saw and heard the dog, and a sturdy walking stick in my other hand. If anybody here is going to chastise me for being ready to protect myself from a potentially vicious dog, please don't. The first day we were only allowed to try to call or text the out of touch ones' phone numbers, before trying to find them if possible, which they recommended in case they were able to tell us they were OK by phone or text, and didn't need anything, and, of course, nobody answered the phone, and the second day we were allowed to call the searching ones' phone numbers as well, to ask them if they had already heard from their person or people, which sometimes they had, and saved us from driving around finding their house so we could have more time to look for other people. This type of weather event will happen where I live, in the mountains southwest of Asheville, probably sometime soon, all it takes is a lot of rain in a short amount of time. In my town a deputy was swept away in his pickup truck and died, and we "only" got 9 inches of rain instead of 20 plus inches. There were some high water rescues here too. The next town over from us in one direction, at a higher elevation, has no way in or out, and a lot of rich people live there, so now some people in my town don't have income because mostly they work over there as a plumber or cleaning houses or painting houses. I learned the fire department runs out of rubber boots and has to ask the community or churches or whoever to get them some more. That a hospital could have no food for patients or staff for days, and then not respond to requests from the media to talk about it. (HCA, owner of the Mission Hospital in Asheville who could probably afford for a fleet of helicopters to bring some food within 5 minutes of the storm ending to their helipad if they can communicate with anybody somehow) That yellow jackets' nests get too much water in them and then the ones who are left might swarm, and next time I'm going to carry (if I'm fortunate enough to help) benadryl to hand out to the linemen I see working on the power lines to take in case they get stung. That you can drive over downed power lines IF they can't touch anything but your vehicle's tires, and never the roof especially, and never if there is an overhanging tree touching the line that could also possibly touch your vehicle. That the ATMs won't work (don't know why anybody was surprised about that, but a lot of people were), that grocery stores would only take cash, or no cash back, at least at first, that one of the grocery store chains' main hub would be flooded and screw up all the others in that chain, that the banks would run out of cash very quickly, that there would be no bananas or eggs almost immediately, that so many people would give so much of their time and money so quickly and selflessly, especially but not only churches, but they were the best organized and first ones making a dent with the food and the water, that there would be so much looting, and that people would think our government would actually help them rebuild. I didn't like that they kept saying on the news that "this is a once in 100 years or once in a generation storm". I don't believe that. I get that they need people to not be freaking out about the next one while they're suffering from this one, but they could just not say that and leave it at that. I hope maybe something I wrote here can help somebody prepare. When it happens here I know more what to expect and some things to do that I hadn't thought of.
Thank You, Carmen, for telling us of your personal experience and how your community is doing. I'm glad you're able to help.
We can give to funds, of course, but helping with ones hands feels like we're really doing something.
Such a powerful piece. Thank you for putting reality front and center in your inimitable way.