Readers note: I wrote this in November ’23, but didn’t publish it. My health is better, FWIW, though I’m still likely not to 100%. It’s still accurate, and I’ll continue the thoughts in the next piece. But this has a lot of important background.

It’s been a busy fall, and I haven’t had much of a chance to write down thoughts. I had a mesenteric venous thrombosis, with mandatory surgery after all this, that knocked the wind out of my summer. And though no real diagnosis has been made regarding the deep ‘why’ — I’m back at about 90% throttle.

One of the interesting things that did happen this fall was a visit from two Russian theoretical physicists deep in the middle of the climate science wars. Anastassia Makarieva and Andrei Nefiodov, both of the Petersburg Institute, came to visit primarily to discuss how one puts forward controversial issues in environmental issues that boil over into intense political discussions. My specialty, I guess!

Makarieva and Nefiodov both have done a first principles approach toward understanding climate science. They are motivated by both a deep love of their own forests on the White Sea, as well as a classic Russian attraction to physics. And since we are now at the edge of debates for planetary scale human actions ostensibly to save us from CO2 pollution, that is, once again, supposedly driving Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) in order to save the planet, my position is pretty straightforward — we better be sure the crisis folks across the globe are purporting to exist actually does, and that what we are proposing at scale does not reap the whirlwind back on us.

To be honest, I’ve had my doubts about the current apocalyptic AGW narrative for a while now. As someone that’s been involved in this fight from the very beginning of the latest chapter (I’m calling this the last 35 years that really started with Bill McKibben’s book, ‘The End of Nature’, first published in 1989) I was always predisposed to the CO2 part of the narrative. And I waited for sea levels to rise, looked at articles on receding glaciers, and considered the, well, considerable iniquity of the various energy companies. All of us with lifelong careers in environmental politics had the map. Fossil fuels were/are bad, they’re literally destroying the planet, we’re going to run out of them, and we need to kick our very bad habit of endless war around them. It was easy, it was pat, and even now, a heckuva lot of it is demonstrably true.

But as sea level rise hasn’t happened — some spots here and there — and anything involving more than a cursory look at glacial receding indicates that glaciers were receding before the real effects of fossil fuel consumption. And finally, the mega-storms predicted haven’t really shown up either. Yes, we have hurricanes, but we’ve always had hurricanes. And we have seen some modest changes in the weather — I’ve noticed some destabilization of Arctic flows in the winter — but that’s about it. No reversal of the Gulf Stream.

What HAS changed is the intensity of the constant drumbeat toward apocalypse that comes out of the media. Weather maps with virtually identical temperature profiles to ones 50 years ago are splashed across our microsecond attention span screens, bright red and orange, predicting the end of the world every summer. But listen, folks. Texas has always been hot. Ask General Philip Sheridan. ” If I owned Texas and Hell, I’d rent out Texas and live in Hell.”

And the reality? Miami, one of the first places predicted to be underwater because of AGW, is no closer to sinking than it ever has been. Which isn’t saying much, considering Florida’s natural precarity. The downstream effects of global warming are starting to seriously not match the narrative.

What is interesting is that, at least for me, there’s not a single piece of progressive activism individually taken to protect the environment that necessarily demands the AGW narrative. Oil companies continue to pollute and want to drill in environmentally sensitive areas. Renewable energy should still be developed apace. Natural areas should be saved, biodiversity protected. But AGW adds an overarching dynamic that none of these smaller pieces of effort demand. It demands wholesale lifestyle changes in spades. And it threatens that if we don’t fall in line with the cadre that insist on its political views, we are literally wrecking life on Earth.

The problem is that the immediate levers that the environmental community are really demanding to solve the climate ‘crisis’, which really sum to complete dismantling of mobility of our current population, their reduction, and a radical change to diet eliminating meat, all have immediate consequences to social structures and independent agency across the planet. Take meat consumption, for example. If we are having anything approaching a civilization-ending crisis, it is the metabolic syndrome/obesity crisis that populations literally everywhere are facing. In the US, we’re approaching something like 55% of the population as being overweight, and some lesser number being obese. I’ve written extensively about how this imbalance in diet, largely solvable by reducing dramatically our diet of manufactured carbohydrates and shifting to a more keto-based diet, is actually making us stupid on a physical level. And depriving people of their health is the one key element of reducing their agency, which then drives depression and isolation, two primary ingredients in any Authoritarian system.

It becomes obvious, then, that while the climate crisis might be up in the air, the memetic crisis is in full swing. To go to a less free, and free thinking society, you simply have to have relational disruption. Without it, people will organize against it — it’s what humans do in the long game. And as I’ve discussed many times on this blog, the key element inside any social network (not just talking about Facebook, folks) that causes that relational disruption are psychopaths. And psychopaths are all about power and control, and folks being depressed. If you’re depressed, you’re far more easy to control.

You’ll see this kind of messaging resonate across contemporary environmentalism. Even the protests symbolically involve gluing oneself to the street, or art, or just about anything. This meme sums it up best.

And the downstream effects of this memetic crisis are manifesting themselves among the young. Motivation in more evolved countries, to get married and have children is poor. It’s also no surprise that the issue eating up far too much oxygen in the political climate is the transgender issue, especially directed at kids. Instead of a focus on personal development, rigid gender stereotypes are used as a reason for any opposing gendered individual as a rationale for hormonal and surgical gender mutilation. If you think those kids were depressed before they started getting inducted as raw material in the gender reassignment industry, wait ten years. More depression, more ease of control. More people with borderline personality disorder and other obvious issues in the spotlight. And importantly, more suspension of agency for any somewhat normal to say that what is happening isn’t just batshit crazy.

I guess the point is this — when Anastassia and Andrei showed up on my doorstep, I was already into the world of increasing skepticism of the AGW narrative. And it turns out my skepticism was well-founded.

Andrei gave the first presentation at night to our local environmental group, the Friends of the Clearwater. He showed some pretty pictures before putting up this graph below.

This turns out to be a very interesting graph indeed. What does it show? The primary users of energy on this planet are not human. The real energetic flux is in soil and microorganisms, or plankton in the ocean. 90% of all energy — the literal life of Gaia — has basically nothing to do with us.

It’s only when you get down to contributions from vertebrates (~1%) that we show up at all. Fossil fuels have magnified our impact. No surprise there maybe boosting it from a thermodynamic basis to around 7%. So we do have an effect. But most of what passes on this planet has nothing to do with us.

I started this piece almost a year ago — and I should have posted it then. But really because of my own fears of social isolation in my community, I didn’t. I should have.

What is really going on with the AGW drumbeat? We’ve moved forward into an election year. No issue is more binned up, L/R, than AGW. Any shred of rationality regarding the consequentiality of this has been literally blown away. I’ll cover that in my next essay. I’ll spare you, my readers the punchline — as a result of out profound social fragmentation, we will now buy anything anyone who acts on our side of the line — for the Left, it’s institutional control — no matter how preposterous, or against events we can witness with our own eyes.

The problem with all this emphasis on control, and single factor blame, is that it’s turned CO2 into The One Ring. And we all know enough Tolkien to know what that means. Except, apparently, even in light of the billionaire class talking about building sulfur cannons on island mountaintops and spraying crazy levels of pollution into the air, we aren’t getting the very direct analogy.