Why does Europe suffer such massive droughts nowadays? Well, there’s more to it than just the obvious answer (global warming). It’s also a situation of coal plants producing the sort of pollution that heats up our atmosphere, which then causes those very same coal plants to be forced to curtail their output as the rivers run dry. In other words, the problem is bigger than just being dependent on Russia. Germany faces the same problem with its coal plants. This makes it difficult for France’s nuclear power plants to produce enough electricity. This reduces the amount of water flowing to the rivers, which means you can dump less cooling water into the rivers without heating them up too much. In the Club of Rome reports, there’s a variable called pollution, it’s a rather crude attempt at modeling the simple fact that industrial activity and food production cause changes to the environment that accumulate and eventually start to interfere with food production and industrial activity.Īs a simple example, consider that Europe is now suffering the worst drought in 500 years. It’s important though to note this is not the only thing that’s happening. It succeeded and we’re now dealing with the consequences. Mr’s Putin’s long term plan, was to gain a strange-hold over the European economy. Your politicians are busy making sure they solve any problem that could stop them from being reelected four years from now, but an autocrat has the ability to make long-term plans. To a large degree this is a consequence of our dependence on a massive country to the east, run by an autocrat who is able to play the long game. Society is remarkably flexible, but if electricity prices increase fifty-fold in two years, rest assured we have a problem. Take a good look, at electricity prices in France and Germany: That’s getting a little harder now, because you’re starting to run into these very same limits to growth now. Most people dismissed this stuff as just another doomsday prophecy. For a long time, these were somewhat hypothetical concerns, discussed on blogs like mine. You can even see the peak in industrial output here, which takes place around 2015 or so here in this model. They even gave us a warning, in regards to when we could expect to run into hard limits. In the 70’s the Club of Rome became well known, for warning there are limits to growth. The fertile crescent that gave birth to civilizations of its own began suffering from these problems much earlier. They eroded the soils and so they were stuck constantly expanding their empire, to feed the people in its center. The Roman empire struggled with these problems too. These are not new discoveries, nor are these problems unprecedented in history. And equally important: In large parts of the world, we are simply destroying our soils. In large parts of the world we also do it with fresh water: Aquifers are being depleted faster than they can regenerate in places like India and the Middle East, in places like the Netherlands we are polluting them with manure so that we can’t use the water without expensive filtering procedures. The trees we use today for wood are of low quality and grow rapidly. We do the same with wood, we don’t have the sort of big trees we would need to restore the Notre Dame to its original state. We consume fossil fuels much faster than they will ever regenerate themselves. We are for our entire way of life, dependent on resources that we are consuming faster than they can regenerate themselves. Today the relevance of the concept should be obvious. So he came up with the idea of lifeboat ethics, which became popular among green thinkers who actually think, like Pentti Linkola. And, as a smart man, he also recognized this was going to cause us trouble. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.”Ī long time ago there lived a smart man, Garrett Hardin, who noticed the human population was expanding to numbers never before seen in history. “What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot.
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