"Doomism"

I continue to enjoy the writings of Eliot Jacobson, including this wonderful essay.

I think he's far and away closer to the truth than anti-doomers like Michael Mann.

While the efforts in the latest Inflation Reduction Act to combat global heating are a step in the right direction, they are little more than a step in a long journey, which should have begun 60 years ago to avoid almost unimaginable catastrophes ahead.

And in fact just fixing carbon isn't going to allow us to evade collapse.  We need degrowth in population, land use, water use, everything.  Not only do we need degrowth, in fact it's going to get done to us, as we are beaten back from formerly valuable farmland, cities, everything.

Anyone that tells you that degrowth in population or anything else will simply take care of itself--without catastrophes and total collapse--is selling hopium.

The best we could possibly do would be to slow the destruction sufficient to allow at least some degree of civilization to survive somewhere.

But if that surviving fragment is just some of the most egoistical humans, they probably won't survive either.

But the truth is, we can't be 100% certain about anything (though, the certainty that the IRA is insufficient does approach 100% to a very large number of decimal places).

So the real question is not what to do with the absolute certainty of doom, but what do do with the almost complete probability of doom.

1) Since complete doom might be avoided, do what can be done, without too much difficulty, to help either lessen the probability of doom or at least delay it somewhat.  Therefore for example, one should express more support than opposition to the IRA, while it's under consideration, and praise the efforts that went into pushing it over the line and trying to make it better.  (At least under the set of assumptions/analyses I have that suggest the bad points won't be as bad as possible and would probably happen anyway, whereas the good points were really up for grabs otherwise now or lost for quite awhile.  And, why not give those experts who say it's about 80% of the change we need at least a chance to see.)

Going on a hunger strike, lighting fire to oneself, etc, are examples of doing too much.  We're pretty unlikely to escape annihilation anyway, so why take it to that point?

OTOH, if there is a credible mass strike, for example, it would be good to be in it, if one is not in a particularly precarious position..  Or even a small demonstration, just not something that presents a huge burden to a lot of relatively ordinary working people--that would be going too far.  A violation of the kindness principle.  But directed to corporations or hegemonic governments, kindness is inapplicable.

What's needed to even attempt to ameliorate doom somehow is virtually a mass change in nearly everything, from global governance to personal "choices."  I don't think the needed change is possible under bourgeois democracy, even with "socialist" orientations (if that's even possible).  It would be much bigger than that.  It would be more like Eco-Communism with a benevolent government operating all the energy and transportation facilities in a deliberate fashion to plow present income into expansion of renewable energy and transportation systems and all the other sustainable changes needed, without depriving anyone of needs now or later.

Is Eco-Communism liberal?  Probably more like CPC version of Democracy, which doesn't satisfy western preconceptions of how democracy is supposed to work, but might generally work better anyway, not to say it might need some changes for America.  And, from the start, it's probably going to be a lot more Revolutionary than Mao.  It might be noted that China itself is building coal plants, probably not exactly the model humanity needs, perhaps even in China.  What we need right now is the kind of eco Communism that isn't going to try to make the situation better in the long run at the expense of carbon emissions today merely for the sake of popularity to hold on to power.  It would have to be more principled, to stick up for reduced human footprint, possibly with the likes of Samuri warriors.  It would have to stick to those principles, and not get sucked into dazzling people with techno utopia.  And to be more principled like this, China would have to go back to the 1 child policy (which has been inflated to 3 children) or, even better yet, my 0.5 child policy.  Perhaps it's even impossible to imagine such change without a Stalin like figure behind it all.  And maybe even he wasn't even tough and paranoid enough.  And since Stalin himself relied on industrial growth to dazzell Soviet citizens with techno utopia (and win a world war), we need an anti-Stalin Stalin, or perhaps an anti-Stalin Anti-Stalin, or perhaps all three.  It would be that difficult and more.  It would not be intellectual anarchists in the park arguing all night long forever to reach consensus.  (Though there probably are worse options than that...such as the one we have.)

Meanwhile and otherwise, it's inconceivable that "incentives" for the corporate crooks who run society could somehow turn it into doing the right thing.  Corporate crocks need to be retired as quickly as possible.  Of course many will be on their side, making the whole vision seem pretty much beyond imagining anyway.  But if you wanted to imagine such a thing, a liberal version would require not only junking Citizens United, but all the Court decisions overruling keeping money out of politics.  Elections should be nearly 100% public funded, with support demonstrated through small ($1 ish) contributions of the people involved in the election only.  And that's just to get to the point of legally regulating corporations (rather than fox guarding the henhouse), and it's just a start, for sure principles of power and wealth will apply so long as they can, and nevertheless the regulations need to be formulated to "force" the impossible corporations into doing the right thing even when it means writing off all their existing wealth.

So any such vision of the revolutionary change seems pretty much impossible, but none more so than the idea that the "self-correcting" market and bourgeois democracy will do much to stall let alone stop the oncoming catastr

If you're in a good position to do so, putting up solar panels might not be a bad thing to do, even well aware that not enough people will do so to save civilization, and with the collapse of everything quite possibly nobody will be living anywhere around your house anyway.

2) Kindness, service, and generosity, as Jacobson promotes, are wonderful.  Be one of those people who would actually deserve to survive the collapse of everyone, not the one who is going to try to be one who does by crushing everyone else's opportunities.

Being a good person encourages others to be good.  That is the best way to increase the probability that the people who survive, if there are any, are good people too.

But don't make huge efforts to survive either, one because you probably won't anyway, and two because that's promoting the same egoism that got us into this situation in the first place.

That's the fundamental point: we must be good people, in the sense of serving others as well as ourselves, as they would choose to be served, not in the sense of grabbing everything for ourselves, our descendants, or our projects.

Only if we are like that, will there be people like that, and therefore a possibility for good people to survive.  And then the best to them.