The End Is Nigh: Our Way Of Life Is Not Sustainable

The Great Collapse is coming. Instead of slowing down to mitigate its worst effects, we are blindly accelerating towards it.

We’re like one of those young fellas at the wheel of his Daddy’s electric SUV on a country road on a very late Saturday night, pumped with energy and alcohol and putting the boot down like there’s no tomorrow, as he approaches a tight bend, three lads in the back whooping, and one terrified girl screaming to slow down.

And yes, with Donald Trump, this death wish is about to get far more visceral and crazy, with unhinged capitalists fracking for oil and gas on one side of him, and apocalyptic Christian evangelists on the other in raptures at the exploding signs of the impending apocalypse. Heaven awaits – and to hell with the rest!

Reality does exist. Truth does exist, no matter how corrupted it may be by the Great Big Lying Machine we call Artificial Intelligence. And the truth is: we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet.

SUPER STORMS

Our way of life is not sustainable. We’re living high on natural inheritances of fossil fuels and metals. We can’t keep going on like this. There are limits, and we have begun to pass many of them. Freshwater is being corrupted and wasted. Soil is rapidly degrading. The oceans are heating and acidifying while being pumped with plastics.

Chemical poisons are flooding the air and rain. There is phosphorus and nitrogen overload spewing into our rivers. Mining is ravaging and destroying the last of the indigenous and wildlife areas.

Biodiversity is collapsing. And we, the Irish, are at the head of the class, the smartest boys in the Growth Death Cult room. Globally, there has been a 50% decline in the bird population since 1970. In Ireland, it was over 60%.

We are so enthusiastic, so practical, so hopeful, so optimistic. We’ll do anything to chase that extra piece of growth, to squeeze out that very last drop of GDP. That’s why we have so embraced the energy and water guzzling data centers that are using more electricity than every child, woman and man in the country. That’s why we’re jumping up and down waving our arms shouting: “AI climate-destroying mega monster! Over here!”

If you challenge any of this stuff, you are labelled a fool, a Luddite, naïve, a pessimist, a doomer, not living in the real world. Do you want to go back to the caves, they sneer? In the world to which our children and grandchildren are headed, a cave will be like a five-star hotel. We act as if we have a choice here. That we can look at the weather and say: “Listen. Don’t hurricane today. Because me and my mates want to get away on that cheap Ryanair deal.”

I’m writing this in Valencia, Spain. I thought I’d retire here, get away from things and enjoy some good weather. We got the weather alright, though not quite what we had anticipated. Three hundred days of sun, they said, and mostly that’s true. What they didn’t mention was the super storms – fuelled by tourism, deforestation, soil degradation and global warming – where you get a year’s worth of rain in a day.

NAZI BAR

We were very lucky. Fifteen minutes away it deluged. I was sure at first that it was AI fakery when I saw pictures of cars piled up in streets. And so many people dead. And, as it sank in for real, I kept thinking, has it started? The collapse.

In truth, it started years ago.

Seventy-five percent of the environmental damage humans have done, we did in just the last 50 years. The top 10% did 50% of this damage. The bottom 50% did 10%. The top 10% includes the Irish middle-class.

All to build a fragile wonderland. In Valencia, I walked through supermarkets with rapidly emptying shelves. Not a drop of bottled water. Vegetables gone. The motorways disrupted to the point of breakdown. It only takes a small shove to knock over this delicate system we have built. This is called progress.

The electricity stayed on this time. And the internet kept working, at least where we live.

When the collapse accelerates, though, the digital infrastructure will fold like a pack of cards. The world Big Tech built, and gouges its profits from, is not resilient. It is jerry-built on a foundation of crap and lies. Its products are deliberately designed to last only a few years, its services to induce addiction, courtesy of the Valley of Pimps and Pushers. And in our Irish culture, it’s all celebrated as progress and great innovation.

The tech bros – Musk, Bezos & Co – are heroes to many. And even those who claim to be vehemently opposed still hang out at the Nazi Bar they used to call Twitter, feeding the monster. They can’t let go, even if it means legitimising a fascist.

We have no idea what’s coming, and even if we did, we lack the will or the resolve to change direction. But I can tell you now that it is going to get worse. Much worse. Watch this space.