I’m a child of the Cold War and fiction like Dr. Strangelove and WarGames made me realize how stupid adults could be. I realized the world could actually end in a nuclear hellfire. A 1970s sci-fi novel called Tech Bros would have been an awesome parody and satire. It would have put MAD to shame. Yet here I am many decades later I can’t believe I’m living through an era where tech bros are real and their ingenious plan to cook the earth to make money could come to pass. Or maybe the world will end before that in an old-school nuclear hellfire after all. Who knows?

we’re getting the worst case-scenario with climate change

We’ve already passed the point of Peak Oil. These fuels only get more expensive to extract with each passing decade. And the political pressures that extraction creates is collapsing the capacity for efficient extraction at least as quickly as the industrial extraction is pinching off the low hanging fruit.

I don’t think its a given that we simply plunge over the 4° C threshold, because I can see an abrupt collapse in access to fossil fuel tying out with a steady increase in the supply of less geographically constrained wind and solar power. Also next-gen nuclear is at least peaking over the horizon, for real this time, given the advent of nuclear freighters in China.

But it’s also possible we demolish the infrastructure we need to replace fossil fuels with renewables, effectively cannibalize the rungs of our technological ladder in order to do… whatever the fuck this is. And then we lodge ourselves in a modern Dark Age, exhausted of the cheap energy that propelled us to the 20th century heights and rapidly losing access to the biome that supports the enormous increase in humans that gave us the brain power to innovate our way out of the last dark age.

Then we’re proper fucked.

people like this will blame some external factor rather than themselves

History is written by the survivors. I do wonder what they’ll write when the events of the modern moment are far enough in the rear view mirror to discuss without wading through a morass of oil industry propaganda. But I seriously doubt the survivors will be the Americans who handcuffed themselves to a decaying industry. I doubt it will be the westerners who have increasingly eschewed the very idea of “liberal arts” as a past time. I doubt it will be a society that incinerates its libraries and post offices and feeds all of academia into a digital set of funhouse mirrors that turns every idea into an advertisement for consumerist crap.

The heart of the western cultural dominance rests in its university systems. And that’s been deteriorating for the last sixty years. The countries that eclipse the NATO block education framework will spell the end of its ability to author the history books.