Tag Archives: resources

Nate Hagens, on Earth and Humanity

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Watch the video presentation “Earth and Humanity: Myth and Reality,” (2:52:15) by Nate Hagens, linked below. Hagens presents an analysis and grand synthesis of the multi-entwined crises of unsustainable human society living in the rapidly degrading world climate of an increasingly resource-depleted and increasingly inhospitable Planet Earth.

I guarantee that you will find many of your own views on this topic reaffirmed by Hagens, and also that he will challenge at least one of your cherished beliefs about it. This is good for serious people, it prompts them to think anew, and to rethink their assumptions.

What impresses me about Hagens’ analysis is that it is based on a wealth of data — the lifeblood of any real scientific or economic analysis — and that it is a multidimensional systems analysis, and not merely a “one note Johnny” narrow expertise (just finance, or just physics), single “smoking gun” caused problem (as the “overpopulation” reductionists claim) or a promotion of a single route to salvation solution (as the “nuclear power” reductionists claim). Hagens’s is an integrated description of the dysfunctional global system, which Nature plus Humanity has become, rather than merely being an uncoordinated list of a myriad of disconnected disasters, pathologies, ruins and wrecks.

Hagens does make specific recommendations near the end of his video, aimed at getting us (particularly in the U.S.A.) to begin dealing with our ongoing global systems failure in a substantive manner. After that he adds a few seconds of wordless video that will delight all lovers of wildlife.

Any abstraction of Hagens’ presentation to a single phrase would wash away all its insights and nuance, and would be unjust to the cause of transmitting understanding to the public. But, if you want an indicative soundbite, here is my maximally reductionist summary: humanity needs to scale back its use of energy very very significantly, and permanently, and now — an energy diet — just like a forever-maintained eat-less food-calorie diet needed to break an individual free from obesity.

Hagens’ video will make any serious person think (and we all better get serious), and that is the first essential step for us ever having a chance to get out of the mess we’re in.

Earth and Humanity: Myth and Reality
16 May 2021 (Nate Hagens)
https://youtu.be/qYeZwUVx5MY

The following two paragraphs are my abstraction and consolidation of internet descriptions of Nate Hagens, with much of this information drawn from The Post Carbon Institute (https://www.postcarbon.org/our-people/nate-hagens/).

Nate Hagens has a Masters Degree in Finance from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. He is a former editor of The Oil Drum and worked on Wall Street for a decade before “seeing the light.” Since 2003 Nate has shifted his focus to understanding the interrelationships between energy, environment, and finance and the implication this synthesis has for human futures. Previously, Nate was President of Sanctuary Asset Management and a Vice President at the investment firms Salomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers. Currently, he teaches a systems synthesis Honors seminar at the University of Minnesota ‘Reality 101 – A Survey of the Human Predicament.’

Nate focuses on the interrelationship between debt-based financial markets and natural resources, particularly energy, and the unplanned for risks from the coming ‘Great Simplification.’ He also addresses the evolutionarily-derived underpinnings to status, addiction, and our aversion to acting about the future and offers suggestions on how individuals and society might better adapt to the coming decades.

Jeff Gibbs 2019 video “Planet of the Humans,” released publicly on Earth Day 2020, was the most important presentation on the realities of our global “climate change” crisis to be made available in many years (https://planetofthehumans.com/). Nate Hagens’ new video “Earth and Humanity: Myths and Reality” is of much grander scope and at least of equal importance. See it and don’t get defensive, then refine your own stance from your points of disagreement with Hagens, and/or improve his systemic analysis, which is the type of thing needed to converge politically on what in all honesty would have to be called a World Plan for guiding human civilization through a transition — the Great Simplification — to a post carbon future, without suffering a catastrophic and life-ending collapse.

As a 20th century mechanical engineer who focused himself on the 19th century science of thermodynamics (and got away with a career in experimental nuclear explosions), I’ve said all what little I was competent to say about the physics and economics of “climate change.” So at this point all I can offer on the topic is bad poetry, and I’ll spare you that. But I can also recognize the value of new presentations like those of Gibbs and Hagens, and urge others to see them, study them, and act on them.

I am mindful of the urgent and totally justified demand posed by the next generation onto us world-controlling and world-destroying adults, through the voice of Greta Thunberg, for “action!” Nate Hagens’ systemic analysis is a very important step toward answering the questions of “what actions?” and “how do we implement them?”, and of actually working on Greta’s demand.

[Thanks to Isabel Ebert for pointing me to Nate Hagens’ video.]

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ADDENDUM:

Richard Heinberg both appears in “Planet of the Humans,” and leads the Post Carbon Institute.

The Most Colossal Planning Failure in Human History
May 2021
Richard Heinberg
https://richardheinberg.com/museletter-339-the-most-colossal-planning-failure-in-human-history

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Petri Dish Gluttony Need Not Be

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“Wilderness and the Value of Doing Nothing (by Dana Johnson, at Counterpunch, 14 May 2021) sounds a lot like how inconvenience is a luxury for the rich. Most rich guy things to have, or to do, are intrinsically inconvenient; the question is how much of the burden is carried by staff and how much is carried by the actual rich person: from yachts to private islands, to healthy cooking, to having time to go to the gym regularly. All of these are associated with wealth.” (EMG comments, edited by MG,Jr.)

What the Greens say is: “Have less of what you don’t need.” Also, what you use, use it thoughtfully (“respectfully,” as all indigenous cultures put it). As David Attenborough says (as have I, for decades): “Don’t waste,” (or “minimize your entropy” if you want to be a thermo-sci-nerd about it).

In being alive you have a right to sustain that life (no one asks to be born): you must eat other life to stay alive, you must breath air and exhale CO2 to survive moment to moment, you must drink clean water and expel bodily wastes to live even a week. But nowhere have you gained the right to waste what Nature and human agriculture can provide for sustenance.

This is basic morality, or basic “socialism,” however you want to put it: it is an undeniable aspect of our natural bond with all of humanity, because, as Aristotle said: “Man is a social animal.” (And for today’s woke pedantics: “Man” = “Human” 2,400 years ago, so today it also = “Woman.”)

If we collectively choose to live like mindless bacteria competitively and gluttonously scavenging all the agar we can in our Planet Earth Petri dish, then we will soon enough exhaust the resources to sustain us en masse, and also poison our group enclosure = extinction. Based on past history (from time immemorial) that is our trajectory.

However, there is absolutely no barrier, neither physical nor scientific (some “law”), that prevents us humans from choosing to base our collective survival (and even fulfillment and happiness) on the basis of our natural “social animal” bond (the planetary human monkey troop), and manage ourselves for mutual care, and to have the continuation of our kind fit within the workings of the Natural World; and that would mean a recovery of Nature, freed from our capitalist (money madness driven) and industrialized resource rapaciousness.

Those who object to this latter vision, calling it “impractical” and “utopian,” are simply emotionally committed to the self-centered and tribal selfishness of the “me and mine have to exhaust the Petri dish before any others can get any of it” (like the psychology of wanting to kill the last rhino for its horn).

The Petri Dish Gluttons rule today, and they may eventually kill us all (from the bottom up, economically, of course), but it DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THAT WAY. And so that “does not have to” is what all “optimism” (as an attitude) and “activism” for climate change response (as per Greta Thunberg, et al.) and “social justice” (everywhere, and brutally shown especially lacking in Palestine this week) is all derived from.

The reason we have had millennia of delays regarding social justice, and decades of delay regarding climate change response is that Petri Dish Gluttony has temporal power (governments, militaries, courts, police, corporations, religion-cults, Jim Crow equivalents) to prevent social justice from occurring, and also to allow PDG to fashion mountains of lies (words, media, treaties, papers, universities, think-tanks, the entire macro-bullshit industry) to cover for their cowardly shame at not admitting the truth openly.

It DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY, and ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE, are corny dreamy slogans for sure, but they are also objectively true. And that truth cannot be acknowledged by PDG because that immediately leads to personal responsibility, which is precisely what PDG seeks to avoid.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/05/14/wilderness-and-the-value-of-doing-nothing/

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Petri Dish Gluttony Need Not Be
21 May 2021
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/05/21/petri-dish-gluttony-need-not-be/

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